Talk:Jesse Gause

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of WikiProject Biography. For more information, visit the project page.	Biography Portal
Start	This article has been rated as start-Class on the project's quality scale. [FAQ]

[edit] Cite request

A request for an inline cite has been added more than once to the following statement currently found in the text of the article:

"Only after historians demonstrated his role in the formation of the Mormon hierarchy [...] was his name restored to the church's list of General Authorities."

The requests for the cite were for documentation on the assertion about the LDS church's action of "restoring" Gause as a documented GA, and that the historians actions were the source of the change, as implied by the wording. The citation request was not regarding the actual work done by Woodford and Quinn, which was found in the general references section. I thought that perhaps discussing this topic here rather putting another cite request up on the article itself would be more useful. -- 63.224.137.164 00:20, 12 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Gause in Counselorship

Jesse Gause was never 1st Counselor in the First Presidency. He served as 2nd Counselor, but is listed as an "other counselor" in the First Presidency in the 2007 Deseret Morning News Church Almanac. Since that is verifiable, I have made the change. --Jgstokes-We can disagree without being disagreeable 03:05, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

It's an anachronistic issue. Smith never designated his initial counselors as "first" or "second". However, Smith lists Gause first when mentioning that he ordained his counselors, so it has been assumed by many that in "today's terms", Gause was 1st and Rigdon was 2d. It seems like a safe assumption. However, the article is more accurate if it just says "a counselor". Snocrates 03:10, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

The only scholarly work on this issue that I can find is the following:

Quinn, D. Michael (1983), “Jesse Gause: Joseph's Smith's Little Known Counselor”, BYU Studies 23 (4): 487–93, <http://byustudies.byu.edu/shop/pdfSRC/23.4Quinn.pdf> .

See especially pages 489–490, where Quinn writes:

"Both men [Gause and Rigdon] were simply called 'counselors' to the Church president, but President Gause may have had the precedence of being First Counselor: Joseph Smith listed him first when recording the organization of the First Presidency, and Jesse Gause was also nearly ten years older than Sidney Rigdon at a time in the Church when seniority was determined on the basis of age. On 10 August 1832, one of Gause's Shaker associates wrote that Jesse Gause 'is yet a Mormon—and is second to the Prophet or Seer—Joseph Smith.'" [footnotes omitted]

The 2007 church almanac does not cite any reasoning for placing Rigdon first and Gause as "other", so it's not terribly convincing. The church didn't even acknowledge Gause was a counselor at all for years, so they may not be the most credible source.

-Snocrates 04:15, 7 November 2007 (UTC)