c. 1820–1825
The Smiths join the neighbourhood treasure hunt
Palmyra neighbours later swore that the Smith family spent much of its time digging for money, often at night. William Stafford's 1833 affidavit describes Joseph Jr. locating caves of gold by placing 'a stone of singular appearance in his hat.' Joseph Smith Sr. told an interviewer in 1830 that he was a firm believer in witchcraft and had spent time and money searching for buried treasure with divining rods.
Disputed Faithful writers say seer-stone use was ordinary in 1820s New York and marginal to the family's life; critics say it was their occupation and the direct precedent for the plates.
1822
Joseph obtains the seer stone from the Chase well
While digging a well for William Chase, Joseph found a smooth stone he thereafter used for seeing. It is the same stone later described in the translation accounts — a point on which Emma Smith, David Whitmer, Martin Harris and Brigham-era church leaders such as George Q. Cannon all agree.
21–22 September 1823
Moroni's visits and the hill
Joseph Smith reported three night visits from a messenger who identified himself as Moroni and told him of a record on gold plates buried in a hill near the family farm. The next day he located the spot but was not permitted to take the plates. He returned each 22 September for four years.
Disputed Grant Palmer argues the earliest tellings describe a treasure-guardian spirit that was recast after 1830 as a resurrected biblical-style angel.
October 1825
Josiah Stowell hires Joseph to look for a silver mine
Stowell, a Chenango County farmer, sought out Joseph because of his reputation for finding lost objects with a stone, and put him to work searching for a supposed Spanish silver mine near the Susquehanna. Joseph boarded with the Stowells, worked the farm, and went to school. The dig failed.
20 March 1826
Examined at South Bainbridge as a 'disorderly person'hinge
Brought before Justice Albert Neely on a complaint sworn by Stowell's nephew, Joseph testified that he had a certain stone which he had occasionally looked at to determine where hidden treasures in the earth were, and that he had told Stowell where to dig. The surviving court record, and bills from Neely and Constable De Zeng, were located by Wesley P. Walters in 1971.
Why this is a hingeIt is Joseph Smith's own sworn description of what the stone did, given eighteen months before he said the same kind of stone produced scripture.
Disputed FAIR argues it was a pre-trial examination with no verdict and that Gordon Madsen concluded Joseph was acquitted; the Tanners and other critics read the Neely bill, which itemises 'Joseph Smith The Glass Looker,' as a record of conviction. The corpus holds both readings and cannot settle it — the Joseph Smith Papers do not cover these records.
22 September 1827
Joseph obtains the plates
Joseph, accompanied by Emma, went to the hill and returned saying he had the plates and the interpreters. Attempts by neighbours to seize them followed through the autumn, and by December he and Emma had moved to her parents' place in Harmony, Pennsylvania.
February 1828
Martin Harris takes the transcript to Charles Anthonhinge
Harris travelled to New York City and met Charles Anthon of Columbia and, by some accounts, Samuel Latham Mitchill. Joseph Smith's history has Anthon certifying the translation as correct, then tearing up the certificate on hearing an angel was involved and saying 'I cannot read a sealed book.' Anthon's own 1834 letter to E. D. Howe called the whole story of his endorsement 'perfectly false' and described the paper as 'all kinds of crooked characters, disposed in columns.'
Why this is a hingeHarris returned convinced enough to mortgage his farm, and both surviving accounts of why he was convinced are told by interested parties who contradict each other.
Disputed Whether Anthon validated anything. Both men's versions are self-serving, the sheet Harris carried is lost, and the surviving 'Anthon transcript' — which passed from David Whitmer's family to the RLDS church in 1903 — does not match Anthon's description of what he saw.
June–July 1828
The 116 pages are losthinge
After repeated requests, Joseph let Martin Harris take home the manuscript he had scribed — later called 116 pages, the book of Lehi. It disappeared and has never been recovered. Lucy Mack Smith records Harris crying that he had lost his soul, and Joseph answering 'All is lost! all is lost!' Emma had just given birth to a son who died. Joseph reported that the interpreters were taken from him.
Why this is a hingeThe loss forced the replacement text — the small plates of Nephi — and every naturalistic and every faithful account of the book's structure turns on how that substitution is explained.
Disputed The Church says a revelation directed Joseph to translate a different, providentially prepared record; critics from M. T. Lamb onward say he could not risk reproducing text an enemy might hold, and Metcalfe argues the whole book's structure changed as a result.
July 1828
Revelations rebuking Joseph (later D&C 3 and 10)
Two revelations followed the loss: one calling Joseph to repentance for having 'feared man more than God,' the other warning that wicked men had altered the stolen pages and directing him not to retranslate them. Translation stopped for roughly nine months.
5–7 April 1829
Oliver Cowdery arrives; rapid dictation beginshinge
Cowdery, a schoolteacher who had boarded with Joseph's parents, walked to Harmony with Samuel Smith and began writing on 7 April. Almost the entire present text was dictated between April and late June 1829. Cowdery later wrote that these were 'days never to be forgotten — to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven.'
Why this is a hingeRoughly 500 pages in under three months, with no evident redrafting, is the central fact both sides must explain.
Disputed Faithful writers treat the speed as evidence of revelation; critical writers propose prepared source documents, memorised rehearsal, oral-homiletic composition, or automatic dictation.
c. 1 June 1829
The work moves to the Whitmer farm at Fayette
Facing opposition in Harmony, Joseph and Cowdery accepted David Whitmer's offer of room and board at his father Peter Whitmer Sr.'s log home in Fayette, New York. The translation was finished there. Emma remained behind.
11 June 1829
Copyright secured at Utica
Richard R. Lansing, clerk of the federal district court for the Northern District of New York, entered the copyright, recording that Joseph Smith Jun. 'hath deposited in this office the title of a Book, the right whereof he claims as author.' A printed mock-up of the title page was filed with it.
Disputed Critics read 'author' as a confession; apologists reply that the 1790 copyright statute offered the term to authors and proprietors but not to translators, and that the 1830 edition also names Joseph as translator.
Late June 1829
The Three Witnesseshinge
Following a revelation promising that 'it is by your faith that you shall obtain a view of them,' Joseph, Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris went into the woods near the Whitmer farm to pray. Harris withdrew and was joined by Joseph separately. All three afterward signed a statement that an angel showed them the plates and that they heard the voice of God declare the translation correct.
Why this is a hingeThe eleven signatures printed in every copy of the Book of Mormon are the church's oldest evidentiary claim, and the argument over what the signers meant has never closed.
Disputed Whether the experience was seen with ordinary eyes. Whitmer insisted in 1886 'of course they were our natural eyes,' while telling others they were 'in the spirit'; Martin Harris told John Gilbert he saw them 'with a spiritual eye' and told a Palmyra lawyer he saw them 'with the eye of faith.'
Late June 1829
The Eight Witnesses
A day or two later, near the Smith cabin in Manchester, eight men — four Whitmers, Hiram Page, and Joseph's father and two brothers — signed a statement that Joseph showed them the plates and that they hefted and handled them. The statement gives no date, no location and no narrative.
Disputed Stephen Burnett reported in 1838 that Harris said the eight 'never saw them & hesitated to sign that instrument for that reason'; Hyrum Smith reportedly answered such claims by saying he had but two hands and two eyes.
17–25 August 1829
Grandin contracts to print; Harris mortgages the farm
Grandin had refused the job, as had Thurlow Weed of Rochester; he agreed once he learned another Rochester printer would take it and once Martin Harris put up security. The contract was for 5,000 copies at $3,000, and on 25 August Harris mortgaged about 151 acres, payable within eighteen months. John H. Gilbert then set nearly all the type on a hand press on the third storey of Exchange Row, sixteen pages to a form, thirty-seven forms between August 1829 and March 1830, supplying the punctuation the manuscript lacked.
26 March 1830
The Book of Mormon offered for sale in Palmyrahinge
The Wayne Sentinel advertised the book — 'containing about 600 pages, large Duodecimo' — for sale wholesale and retail at the Palmyra Bookstore. The Church of Christ was organised eleven days later.
Why this is a hingeThe book precedes the church; everything institutional that follows rests on a volume that was on sale before there was anyone to sell it to.
February 1831 (pamphlet 1832)
Alexander Campbell publishes the first analysis
Campbell's essay in the Millennial Harbinger, reissued in Boston in 1832 as Delusions, examined the book's internal evidence rather than its author's reputation. He charged that it addressed 'every error and almost every truth discussed in New York for the last ten years,' and objected that Nephites kept temples and priesthood outside the Levitical order.
Disputed Oliver Cowdery answered Campbell in the Messenger and Advocate in 1835; Hugh Nibley later asked why, if Campbell's local-origin explanation was so obvious, critics abandoned it for a century of Spalding theorising.
August–September 1833
Hurlbut gathers the Spalding affidavits
Doctor Philastus Hurlbut, recently excommunicated, interviewed eight of Solomon Spalding's former Conneaut neighbours, who said they remembered names and episodes from his unpublished romance appearing in the Book of Mormon. Hurlbut wrote the affidavits himself; Fawn Brodie later noted that the style is uniform throughout.
1834
Mormonism Unvailed sets the terms of criticism
E. D. Howe published Hurlbut's material along with Charles Anthon's letter, and argued in his final chapter that Sidney Rigdon obtained Spalding's manuscript from a Pittsburgh printing office and worked it into the Book of Mormon. Howe conceded he had no positive proof of the Rigdon connection.
Disputed The theory requires a second Spalding manuscript that has never been produced, and a Smith–Rigdon acquaintance before 1830 for which no direct evidence exists. Most critics have abandoned it; a minority, including Craig Criddle, still argue for Rigdon's involvement.
1837 (Kirtland edition)
Joseph Smith revises the text
For the second edition Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery corrected the 1830 text against the manuscripts and made editorial changes. Four passages in 1 Nephi were altered: 'the mother of God' became 'the mother of the Son of God,' and 'the Eternal Father' and 'the Everlasting God' became 'the Son of' each. Further changes followed in 1840.
Disputed The Tanners and Richard Howard read the four Godhead changes as tracking Joseph's shift away from a modalist reading; FAIR calls them clarifications the translator was entitled to make, and notes Oliver Cowdery had just answered Campbell's jibe about 'the mother of God.'
1838
The witnesses scatter
Oliver Cowdery was tried and excommunicated at Far West; David and John Whitmer and W. W. Phelps were disciplined; Martin Harris was excommunicated in Kirtland. Whitmer said God told him by his own voice in June 1838 to separate himself from the Latter Day Saints. Stephen Burnett's letter that year reports Harris publicly qualifying what he had seen.
3 March 1850
Oliver Cowdery dies at Richmond
Cowdery had returned to the church in 1848 at Council Bluffs and wintered with the Whitmers in Richmond, Missouri. David Whitmer, John Whitmer, Philander Page and others said he reaffirmed his testimony on his deathbed. No record of a denial by any of the eleven witnesses has been produced.
Disputed Critics reply that never recanting is not evidence that the thing recounted occurred, and that most of the eleven were Whitmers or Smiths by blood or marriage.
1 October 1879
Emma Smith's last testimony is published
Months before her death Emma told her son Joseph Smith III that she frequently wrote day after day, sitting at the table close by Joseph, 'he sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us.' She had written to Emma Pilgrim in 1870 that the interpreters were used for the lost portion and a small dark stone thereafter.
19 March 1881, and 1887
David Whitmer's proclamation and Address
Answering a newspaper claim that he had recanted, Whitmer published a proclamation stating that he had 'never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof,' appending the names of twenty-two Richmond citizens to vouch for him. His 1887 Address repeated it, added that neither Cowdery nor Harris ever denied theirs, and gave his description of the stone in the hat — inside a book that rejects Joseph Smith's church after 1834.
2006–2013
The introduction is reworded
The Book of Mormon introduction, written by Bruce R. McConkie in 1981, had said the Lamanites 'are the principal ancestors of the American Indians.' A one-word change made them 'among the ancestors.' A church spokesman said the revision 'takes into account details of Book of Mormon demography which are not known.'
Disputed Reported by critics as a retreat under the pressure of genetics; described by the Church as a correction of a non-canonical study aid.
2013–2014
The Gospel Topics essayshinge
The Church published 'Book of Mormon Translation,' stating that 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 that the two instruments were 'apparently interchangeable.' 'Book of Mormon and DNA Studies' followed in 2014.
Why this is a hingeIt is the moment the institution's public account converged with the nineteenth-century eyewitness record most members had never been taught, and it changed what a faithful reader is now arguing about.
Disputed LDS Discussions and MormonThink argue the essays concede in cautious prose what critics were disciplined for saying; FAIR and Interpreter treat them as the natural continuation of what Church publications had always allowed.
2018
Saints, volume 1
The Church published a narrative history in its own voice, with the Anthon visit, the lost manuscript and the witnesses told in scene. Its account of the plates does not use the name Cumorah for the New York hill.
