A village seer
Before Joseph Smith was a prophet he was a paid specialist in a trade his neighbours understood perfectly well. Palmyra had several seers; D. Michael Quinn counted Sally Chase with her greenish stone, William Stafford, and Joshua Stafford with a peepstone of white marble bored through the centre. Joseph acquired his own around 1822 while digging a well on the Chase property, and used it as such stones were used — to look for lost objects and buried money. William Stafford swore in 1833 that a great part of the Smiths' time was devoted to digging for money, especially at night, and that Joseph claimed to see into caves under the hills by placing a stone in his hat so as to exclude all light. 1
Joseph never denied the work; he minimised it. Asked in 1838 whether he had been a money digger, he answered that he had, and that it 'was never a very profitable job to him, as he only got fourteen dollars a month for it.' 2 Erie Canal labourers made eight to twelve. The most exact record we have is not a memoir but a court docket. In March 1826, on a complaint sworn by a nephew of his employer Josiah Stowell, Joseph was examined at South Bainbridge as a disorderly person and impostor. He testified that he had a certain stone which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the bowels of the earth were, and that he had told Stowell where to dig. 3 William Purple, invited by the justice to take notes, remembered the stone exhibited in court: about the size of a small hen's egg, layered in colours. 4
The corpus does not settle what the 1826 proceeding legally was. FAIR calls it a pre-trial examination that ended without a fine or a verdict, and quotes Gordon Madsen's conclusion that Joseph was acquitted; the Tanners, working from the bills Wesley Walters found in 1971, read Justice Neely's itemised charge against 'Joseph Smith The Glass Looker' as a record of conviction. The Joseph Smith Papers do not hold the 1826 legal records at all. What both camps concede is the sworn description of the instrument — which matters, because the same instrument is about to produce scripture. The Church's own essay now says so: as a young man Joseph used a seer stone to look for lost objects and buried treasure, and 'as Joseph grew to understand his prophetic calling, he learned that he could use this stone for the higher purpose of translating scripture.' 5
The plates and the professor
Joseph said he received the plates on 22 September 1827, four years after the first of Moroni's visits, with Emma waiting at the hill. Through the autumn neighbours tried to take them; by December he and Emma had moved to her parents' farm in Harmony. There he copied characters from the plates and, he said, translated some of them by means of the interpreters.
In February 1828 Martin Harris carried a sheet of those characters to New York City and showed it to Charles Anthon, then an adjunct professor of Greek and Latin at Columbia. Joseph's history, later canonised, has Anthon pronouncing the translation 'correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian,' issuing a certificate, then demanding it back and tearing it up when he learned an angel was involved, saying 'I cannot read a sealed book.' 6 Anthon's own account, written to E. D. Howe in 1834 and printed in Mormonism Unvailed, says the opposite: the story of his endorsement was 'perfectly false,' the paper 'consisted of all kinds of crooked characters, disposed in columns,' and he had warned the farmer he was being cheated. 7
Neither man is disinterested and the sheet Harris carried has not survived. The document now called the Anthon transcript passed through David Whitmer's family to the RLDS church in 1903; Bushman notes that its characters remain undeciphered, and concludes that either Anthon was bluffing or Harris was mixed up. 8 The Church's own narrative history splits the difference, having Anthon see similarities with Egyptian, issue the certificate, and recommend Samuel Mitchill: 'He is very learned in these ancient languages, and I have no doubt he will be able to give you some satisfaction.' 9 What is not in dispute is the effect. Harris came home and put up his farm.
All is lost
By June 1828 Harris had scribed something like 116 pages, the book of Lehi. He asked to take it home to show his wife. Joseph asked the Lord three times; the third answer let him go. Weeks passed. Joseph travelled to Palmyra and Harris arrived at the Smith house walking slowly, pressed his hands to his temples and said he had lost his soul. Lucy Mack Smith recorded her son's reply: 'Oh, my God!' said Joseph, clinching his hands. 'All is lost! all is lost!' 10 Emma had just given birth to a son who died; she nearly died herself. Joseph said an angel took the interpreters from him.
The manuscript has never been recovered, and Joseph never reproduced it. A revelation warned that wicked men had altered the stolen pages and would use any retranslation to discredit him; instead he was to translate a different record, the small plates of Nephi, prepared for exactly this contingency. Critics from M. T. Lamb in 1887 onward have found the arrangement too convenient by half: that a fortunate theft produced, in the replacement, the most doctrinally rich portion of the book. 11 Brent Metcalfe pressed the point further, arguing that the crisis reorganised the whole text and that Joseph's own understanding of the plates' structure grew more complex across four successive configurations as he dictated. 12
FAIR's answer is that the objection is self-defeating: a man capable of dictating six hundred pages could obviously have dictated 116 more, so fear of exposure explains nothing that ordinary obedience does not. The corpus holds both arguments and no document that decides between them.
A stone in a hat
In April 1829 Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher who had boarded with Joseph's parents, walked more than a hundred miles to Harmony and began writing on the seventh. Almost the entire surviving Book of Mormon was dictated between then and the last days of June. Cowdery later called them days never to be forgotten, sitting under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven. 13
How it was done was described, consistently, by everyone who watched. Emma, the first scribe, told her son in 1879 that she 'frequently wrote day after day, often sitting at the table close by him, he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.' 14 David Whitmer gave the fullest version in 1887: 'Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English.' 15 Martin Harris described the same method, and told of swapping the stone for a lookalike he found by the river, at which Joseph looked into the hat and said all was dark as Egypt.
For most of the twentieth century this was not what members were taught, and Joseph Fielding Smith wrote that it 'hardly seems reasonable' that the prophet would substitute something inferior to the Urim and Thummim. 16 The 2013 Gospel Topics essay settled the question in the Church's own voice: 'According to these accounts, Joseph placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument,' and the two instruments 'were apparently interchangeable and worked in much the same way such that, in the course of time, Joseph Smith and his associates often used the term "Urim and Thummim" to refer to the single stone as well as the interpreters.' 17 That sentence rearranged the argument for everyone. Apologists now argue that a seer is a see-er and that reading from a manuscript seen in vision places Joseph with Ezekiel; critics argue that the essay concedes, in careful prose, the thing they were dismissed for saying.
Eleven signatures
A revelation given at Fayette promised Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris a view of the plates, the breastplate, the sword of Laban and the interpreters — but on a condition: 'it is by your faith that you shall obtain a view of them.' 18 In late June the four men went into the woods to pray. The first attempt failed; Harris withdrew, blaming himself, and was joined by Joseph separately. The statement they signed says an angel laid the plates before them and the voice of God declared the translation correct. A day or two later, near the Smith cabin in Manchester, eight more men signed a second statement saying Joseph showed them the plates and they had hefted and handled them. 19
As historical documents these are thin. Neither gives a date, a place, or a narrative; the earliest copies are in Oliver Cowdery's handwriting in the printer's manuscript, the signed originals apparently not surviving. Eight of the eleven were Whitmers or Smiths by blood or marriage. 20 What they did afterwards, however, is unusually well documented. Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 after accusing Joseph of adultery and stayed out for a decade; Whitmer left in 1838 and never returned, saying God told him by his own voice to separate himself from the Latter Day Saints; Harris was cut off in Kirtland. None of the three retracted. Whitmer, needled by a newspaper in 1881, published a proclamation: 'I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof,' with twenty-two Richmond neighbours attesting his character. 21
The live dispute is over what they meant by seeing. In 1838 Stephen Burnett wrote that he had heard Martin Harris state in a public congregation 'that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination, neither Oliver nor David & also that the eight witnesses never saw them & hesitated to sign that instrument for that reason.' 22 John Gilbert, setting the type for the Three Witnesses' testimony, asked Harris directly whether he had seen the plates with his naked eyes, and remembered him looking down and answering, 'No, I saw them with a spiritual eye.' A Palmyra lawyer got a similar answer: 'I did not see them as I do that pencil-case, yet I saw them with the eye of faith.' 23 Whitmer, asked the same question in 1886, gave the opposite emphasis: 'Of course they were our natural eyes. There is no doubt that our eyes were prepared for the sight, but they were our natural eyes nevertheless.' 24 FAIR reads 'spiritual eye' as ordinary scriptural idiom for a vision that was nonetheless real; Vogel reads it as exactly what it says, and notes that Harris left the door open when he could have closed it. Both men are quoting the same sentences.
The farm and the press
The book that resulted had to be paid for. Joseph secured the copyright at Utica on 11 June 1829, the clerk recording that Joseph Smith Jun. 'hath deposited in this office the title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as author' — statutory language that has been read ever since as a confession by critics and as a legal formality by defenders, since the 1790 act offered the term to authors and proprietors but not to translators. 25
Egbert B. Grandin refused the job. So did Thurlow Weed of Rochester, who advised Harris not to beggar his family. Grandin changed his mind on learning that Elihu Marshall of Rochester would take it, and on 25 August 1829 Martin Harris mortgaged about 151 acres for $3,000 against 5,000 copies, payable within eighteen months. 26 John Gilbert set nearly all the type on a hand press on the third storey of Exchange Row, sixteen pages to a form, thirty-seven forms in seven months, supplying the punctuation the manuscript lacked; Cowdery carried copy to the shop each day and took it home each night. 27 On 26 March 1830 the Wayne Sentinel advertised the book, about 600 pages, large duodecimo, for sale at the Palmyra Bookstore. Eleven days later the church was organised. The book did not sell, and in April 1831 Harris sold the land.
Who wrote it
The first serious critique came from the man whose movement Sidney Rigdon had left. Alexander Campbell read the book and published an analysis in February 1831, reprinted in Boston in 1832 as Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon, with an Examination of its Internal and External Evidences, and a Refutation of its Pretences to Divine Authority. 28 His charge was environmental: the book answered 'every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years' — infant baptism, the trinity, freemasonry, the ministry, the millennium — all decided in advance by a man who could not have known them in 600 BC. 29
Three years later E. D. Howe replaced that argument with a conspiracy. Working from affidavits Doctor Philastus Hurlbut gathered from Solomon Spalding's former neighbours, Mormonism Unvailed proposed that Spalding's unpublished romance about ancient mound-builders reached Sidney Rigdon through a Pittsburgh printing office and became the Book of Mormon. Howe admitted he had no positive proof of the link. The theory ruled the nineteenth century and then collapsed: a genuine Spalding manuscript was recovered in Honolulu in 1884 and bore little resemblance to the Book of Mormon, and no evidence has ever established that Joseph Smith met Rigdon before December 1830. A minority of critics still argue for a second, lost manuscript; most, including Fawn Brodie, abandoned it.
What replaced it is the argument Campbell started. Vogel reads Joseph as a 'pious deceiver' who believed in his own calling while staging its evidence, and devotes two-thirds of his biography to the three years of composition. Grant Palmer argues the Moroni narrative was standardised after 1830 from earlier accounts of a treasure-guardian. 30 Others have proposed automatic writing, or the Methodist preaching technique of 'laying down heads,' and the apologetic reply to all of them is the same: whatever mechanism you name has to account for six hundred pages in three months with no evident redrafting, dictated by a man his own family described as plain-spoken and barely schooled.
What the ground says
The historicity fight has moved from manuscripts to laboratories. Simon Southerton, a molecular biologist and former bishop, mapped maternal lineages across 7,300 Native Americans from 175 tribes and found no Middle Eastern signature; he published Losing a Lost Tribe in 2004 and left the church. The Church's 2014 essay does not dispute the Asian affinity of Amerindian DNA. It argues instead that the question is malformed: nothing is known of the DNA Lehi, Sariah and Ishmael carried, so there is nothing definite to search for, and founder effect and genetic drift can erase a small founding group entirely. 31 Southerton has conceded that a party of thirty could vanish genetically into a population of millions — and replies that the concession is not the issue, because what the prophets taught was hemispheric. The introduction to the Book of Mormon was quietly changed in 2006 from Lamanites as 'the principal ancestors' of the American Indians to 'among the ancestors,' a revision a church spokesman said takes account of demography 'which are not known.'
The same shape recurs with anachronisms. Horses, steel, chariots, wheat, silk and elephants appear in a text set in pre-Columbian America. Apologists answer with loan-shifting — that 'horse' may name a tapir or deer and 'sword' a macuahuitl — and with John Clark's tally that of sixty contested items, eight were archaeologically confirmed in 1842 and forty-five by 2005. Critics answer that equivocation arrives only under necessity, and that a tight translation off a stone leaves no room for the translator to reach for the wrong English word. Geography splits the faithful against each other: John Sorenson's limited Mesoamerican model, which requires Book of Mormon 'north' to sit some sixty degrees off true north, against the North American Heartland model, each with its own conferences and tour industry, and neither endorsed by the Church, which has taken no position since George Q. Cannon said in 1890 that there had been no revelation on the subject.
Two facts sit at the bottom of all of it and neither camp disputes them. Joseph Smith produced the text at extraordinary speed by a method his own church now describes accurately. And eleven men signed statements they never took back, in language none of them explained the same way twice. Everything else in this topic is an argument about what those two facts can carry. 32