The Golden Plates: A Record No One Can See

Before dawn on 22 September 1827, Joseph Smith, a twenty-one-year-old farmer's son of Manchester, near Palmyra in western New York, went up a hill near his family's farm. He said that an angel named Moroni had shown him a stone box buried in its side four years earlier, and that this night, at last, he was permitted to take what was in it: a book of thin metal plates that looked like gold, bound with three rings and engraved in an unknown script. From them, over the next two years, he dictated the Book of Mormon, the founding scripture of the Latter Day Saint movement. The plates themselves, he said, were then taken back by the angel.

The story as Smith and his witnesses told it

• 1823: Moroni first appears to Smith and tells him of the buried record.
• 1827: Smith receives the plates, with two seer stones set in a frame, the "interpreters". He keeps them covered and says he is forbidden to show them.
• 1828: Martin Harris, a farmer who financed the book, takes a sheet of characters copied from the plates to the classicist Charles Anthon in New York. Harris said Anthon confirmed them; Anthon later wrote that he had told Harris they were a hoax. That summer the first 116 pages of the dictated translation, lent to Harris, are lost.
• 1829: With Oliver Cowdery as scribe, Smith dictates most of the text in about three months. Three Witnesses sign a statement that an angel showed them the plates; Eight Witnesses that Smith showed them and they "did handle with our hands".
• 1830: The Book of Mormon is printed at Palmyra by E. B. Grandin.

The text

Smith said the plates recorded, in "reformed Egyptian", the history of peoples who came from the Near East to the Americas, above all the Nephites and Lamanites, and the visit of the risen Christ to them. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and other Latter Day Saint churches hold it to be scripture alongside the Bible.

What survives

About 28 per cent of the original dictated manuscript survives, damaged by years in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House; the printer's manuscript copied from it is nearly complete. In 2017 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints bought the printer's manuscript from the Community of Christ for $35 million, the highest price then paid for a manuscript. A sheet of characters, the "Caractors" document, also survives.

Symbology and sacred encoding

Reformed Egyptian. The characters on the Caractors document do not match any known writing system. Latter-day Saint scholars have compared them with Egyptian scripts; Egyptologists and linguists have not accepted any match.

Seer stones. Witnesses described Smith dictating with his face in a hat, looking at a seer stone. The Church has published photographs of one such stone.

The witnesses' statements. Printed in every edition, the eleven testimonies are the book's own evidence for the plates. Latter-day Saint historians point out that none of the witnesses formally withdrew his testimony, though several later broke with Smith. What they experienced is debated.

Connections

New Religious Movements (ch35). Compare the Book of the Law (V73), another nineteenth- and twentieth-century scripture presented as revealed, and the Emerald Tablet (V03) for a text with a claimed lost original.

From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/vault/golden-plates.html