1820–1830 (with disputes running to the present)
How a 588-page scripture came out of a hat, a farm, and a printing shop
12 people, ordered by how much of this topic turns on them. Each note describes the person's part in this topic, not a biography — the same person carries a different note on another topic.
Dictated the entire text between 1828 and June 1829, most of it in a roughly three-month burst in spring 1829. He was a paid village 'glass looker' before he was a prophet, and he used the same brown seer stone for both purposes. He filed the 1829 copyright as 'author' because federal law required that word, and he himself edited the text for the 1837 and 1840 editions.
Wrote the lost 116 pages, carried the character transcript to Charles Anthon in New York, and mortgaged 151 acres of his Palmyra farm to Grandin to secure the $3,000 printing bill. He signed the Testimony of Three Witnesses and never publicly withdrew it, but he is also the witness who spoke of seeing the plates with a 'spiritual eye' and an 'eye of faith,' which is the single most quoted line on either side of the argument.
A schoolteacher boarding with the Smiths, he arrived in Harmony on 5 April 1829 and began writing two days later; almost the whole surviving text was dictated to him. He also made the printer's manuscript and copied the witness testimonies into it. Excommunicated in 1838 after accusing Joseph of adultery, he rejoined the church in 1848 and, according to those at his deathbed, never retracted his witness statement.
Hosted the completion of the translation at his father's Fayette farm and was one of the Three Witnesses. He left the church permanently in 1838 and spent fifty years as a non-Mormon in Richmond, Missouri, repeatedly reaffirming the vision while rejecting Joseph Smith's later leadership. His 1887 Address to All Believers in Christ is both the best-known description of the seer-stone-in-hat method and a sweeping repudiation of the church.
Wrote for Joseph before Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery, and in her 1879 'Last Testimony' described sitting at the table while he dictated with his face in the hat. She also distinguished the instruments: the interpreters for the lost portion, and afterward 'a small stone, not exactly black, but was rather a dark color.' Her account is used by every camp because she was in the room and had no institutional reason to flatter the Utah church.
Her family memoir is the fullest narrative source for the household during the plates years, including the scene when Martin Harris returned without the manuscript and Joseph cried 'All is lost! all is lost!' She also recorded her husband's treasure-seeking and dream-visions, material that later historians read as the matrix out of which the plates narrative grew.
In February 1828 Martin Harris showed him a sheet of copied characters. Joseph Smith's history says Anthon pronounced the translation correct and then tore up his own certificate; Anthon's 1834 and 1841 letters say he told Harris the whole thing was a fraud and denied ever calling the characters Egyptian. Both accounts are self-interested, and neither can be checked against the sheet Harris actually carried, which does not survive.
Publisher of the Wayne Sentinel; he refused the job at first, and agreed only after learning a Rochester printer would take it and after Martin Harris put up his farm as security. He printed 5,000 copies for $3,000 between August 1829 and March 1830 and advertised the book for sale in his own newspaper on 26 March 1830.
Set nearly all the type and did most of the press work on the first edition, and supplied the punctuation the manuscript lacked. His 1887 statement and 1892 memorandum are the most detailed technical account of how the book was printed. He is also the source for the exchange in which Martin Harris, asked whether he saw the plates with his naked eyes, answered that he saw them with a spiritual eye.
Published Mormonism Unvailed in 1834, built on affidavits gathered by the excommunicated Doctor Philastus Hurlbut. The book set the terms of anti-Mormon argument for a century: the Smiths as money-diggers, and the Book of Mormon as a reworking of Solomon Spalding's unpublished romance passed through Sidney Rigdon. It also printed Anthon's letter denying Harris's version of their meeting.
Leader of the movement Sidney Rigdon left for Mormonism. His 1831 essay, reprinted as the pamphlet Delusions in 1832, was the first sustained textual analysis of the Book of Mormon, arguing from the inside of the book rather than from gossip about its author. He charged that it answered 'every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years' — the founding statement of the environmental-authorship case.
Wrote an unpublished romance about ancient American mound-builders around 1812 and died in 1816. Eight of his former neighbours told Hurlbut in 1833 that they remembered names and episodes shared with the Book of Mormon. The manuscript recovered in Honolulu in 1884 bore little resemblance to it, which is why nearly every camp now treats the Spalding theory as dead — while a small critical minority argues a second manuscript existed.
