Introduction

In November 1845, the Apostle Wilford Woodruff reflected thoughtfully on his life in the pages of his journal. He wrote, “I . . . have read the Book of Mormon much during the Last twelve years of my life And my soul delighteth much in its words teaching and Prophesyings And in its Plainness. I rejoice in the goodness and mercy of the God of Israel In Preserving the precious Book of Mormon & bringing it to light in our day & generation. It teaches the honest & humble mind the great things of God that were performed in the land of promise now called America in Ancient days And also the great things of God that are nigh even at the doors.” Referring to the book as “this Precious treasure,” Woodruff testified of the prophecies contained in it and of Joseph Smith, who had translated the work by the power of God.

Woodruff marveled that so many people had come to embrace the Book of Mormon in such a short time. In only fifteen years, thousands of men and women had, like himself, undergone a powerful religious transformation because of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s teachings. “The commencment of this great work & dispensation,” he wrote, “was like a grain of mustard seed even small. The Plates containing the Book of Mormon was revealed to Joseph Smith & deliverd unto him By an Angel of God in the month of September 1827 & translated through the Urim & Thum-mim into the English language by Joseph Smith the Prophet Seer & revelator who was raised up out of the loins of Ancient Joseph to esstablish this work in the last days.”¹

Woodruff’s personal journey of faith had begun years earlier as he searched for truth among the various competing religious claims made by Christian sects during the Second Great Awakening. When Woodruff heard a Mormon elder, Zera Pulsipher, preach in a public meeting in late December 1833 about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, he “felt the spirit of God to bear witness” that his search for truth had come to an end. He wrote, “I truly felt that it was the first gospel sermon that I had ever herd. I thought it was what I had long been looking for.” He was baptized, and his journal captured his thoughts about the Book of Mormon: “I believed it was light out of darkness and truth out of the ground.”²

The centrality of the Book of Mormon and its prophetic translation to Woodruff’s personal testimony only grew with time. Eight years later, he wrote with reverence and awe about a meeting of several of the Apostles during which “Joseph the Seer . . . unfolded unto them many glorious things of the kingdom of God.” As part of that meeting Woodruff and others were shown the very seer stone that Joseph had used to translate much of the Book of Mormon, and Woodruff exulted, “I had the privilege of seeing for the first time in my day the URIM & THUMMIM.”³

Wilford Woodruff’s conversion to the Mormon faith came years after Joseph Smith no longer had the gold plates in his possession. Unlike John Whitmer and Hiram Page, Woodruff never got to heft, feel, or examine the plates to know that they were real. Unlike David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, Woodruff did not see the angel deliver Joseph the plates or witness the miraculous power by which Joseph Smith rendered the inscrutable hieroglyphics into English so they could be read. He only saw the seer stone used to translate the Book of Mormon years after his conversion. Like so many modern-day Mormons, Woodruff had to take the explanations of the Book of Mormon, the gold plates, and the translation process on faith. But as the above quotes from Woodruff demonstrate, these explanations of the translation process came to be not only a part of his faith but a pillar of it. He believed Joseph was indeed the Lord’s seer because of the great translation work he had performed using the instruments that God had prepared centuries earlier.

However, Woodruff, again like so many believers in the Book of Mormon today, was very much in the minority with his choice to accept the claims made by Joseph Smith of the record’s divine nature and origin. Not everyone greeted the prophetic claims of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon with such welcoming arms. In August 1829, a Palmyra newspaperman, Jonathan Hadley, published the earliest known account of the retrieval and translation of the gold plates. A bitter skeptic of a book that was about to be published by the competing publisher in Palmyra, Hadley railed on Smith’s claims as the “greatest piece of superstition that has ever come within the sphere of our knowledge.” Hadley met the idea that Joseph Smith had found the “Gold Bible” with doubt and disdain. He repeated with incredulity the story he had been told about how Joseph had been “visited by the spirit of the Almighty” and told that a nearby hill contained an “ancient record of a divine nature and origin.” He informed his readers that the “leaves of the Bible were plates of gold, about eight inches long, six wide, and one eighth of an inch think, on which were engraved characters or hieroglyphics.” Hadley further reported that Smith had translated the plates by the means of spectacles found with them and that the book was “soon to be published” in Palmyra. With derision he added how dubious it was that “a person like this Smith (very illiterate) should have been gifted by inspiration to find and interpret it.”⁴

From Hadley’s first published derisive account of the translation of the Book of Mormon to Wilford Woodruff’s total acceptance of it as a gift of God to a shattered, broken, and sinful world, detractors and embracers of the faith have focused on the Book of Mormon as central to the foundation of the religion. When the anti-Mormon author Eber D. Howe, desperate to discredit a faith that his sister and wife had already joined, hired an excommunicated member in 1833 to provide evidence that would destroy the movement, he focused on the origin of the Book of Mormon. Notwithstanding such opposition, in late 1841 Woodruff recorded Joseph Smith’s testimony of the book: “Joseph Said the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any Book on Earth & the key stone of our religion & a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts than any other Book.”⁵ Thus for believers and opponents alike, the gold plates and the story of their translation have been and continue to be a key rampart on the battlefield of faith.

This book was written to provide interested inquirers a detailed explanation of how Joseph Smith and the scribes who served with him described the process by which the gold plates were translated into English and the difficulties encountered as they sought to publish the completed book. Although both members and academics alike often think of this story as well known, recent insights and discoveries associated with the efforts by the Church History Department to annotate and publish The Joseph Smith Papers have provided a fuller, richer understanding of the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. This book will follow what will often seem like the very familiar story of Joseph Smith’s efforts from 1827 to 1830, but it will diverge at times to provide the reader with new and significant details about these formative years of Mormonism. Interested readers will find many exciting and new things in the book.

While working as historians and editors of the Joseph Smith Papers Project, we found that newly discovered sources and a closer examination of existing ones revealed a much more nuanced and profound story about the process of translation than has generally been represented in the past. Many of these new ideas and discoveries have been published in Documents, Volume 1 of The Joseph Smith Papers, but only within the brief introduction to the volume and the annotation of various documents contained in it. The research performed in regards to that volume and other volumes of the Joseph Smith Papers Project was critical to the changes made to the section headings in the 2013 edition of the Doctrine and Covenants of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While these changes were generally brief, often involving only a new location or date, the implications of those changes for the historical record are quite significant. At times, the new dating entirely changes the storyline of the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon.

For instance, this book contains a new narrative of the complicated and difficult process Joseph Smith undertook to negotiate with several printers to publish the Book of Mormon. Much of our previous understanding of the steps taken to pay for the printing of Book of Mormon has been altered as a consequence of research that corrected the date of Doctrine and Covenants section 19 from March 1830 to summer 1829. This date change has far-reaching implications for our understanding of the revelation, Martin Harris, the negotiations with the printers, and the delays associated with printing the Book of Mormon. Though we have presented some of this work in public presentations, this will be the first time that our research has been published in full. Therefore, this book uses that research to tell the whole story behind this foundational event.

Just as these new conclusions surrounding the negotiations were informed by research performed on the Joseph Smith Papers Project, the reexamination of these early documents also revealed a new understanding of how Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon. In our work on Documents, Volume 1, understanding the Book of Mormon translation was critical to understanding Joseph’s early revelations, which were apparently received in the same way the gold plates were translated—via the use of seer stones.

Thus this book expands beyond the scope of the research that we did for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and the Church History Department. This expansion will help readers more fully understand two of the foundational events of Mormonism: Joseph Smith’s translation of the gold plates and his publication of the resulting text as the Book of Mormon. Throughout this book, the reader will see the translation process haltingly and unevenly unfold as it did for Joseph Smith from September 1827 to June 1829. This book will show Joseph’s struggle to learn to translate and then work through each problem of translation, while looking at the experience of each scribe in his or her own historical setting. It will point readers to the primary sources—the original texts—that inform these conclusions. It will examine and explain these sources in a narrative form that takes seriously the accounts of those that were witnesses to the events.

The actual process by which the Book of Mormon was translated, according to the witnesses of the event and the earliest sources, is generally unknown to members of the Church. Because Joseph Smith only explained that “through the medium of the Urim and Thummim I translated the record by the gift, and power of God,” little emphasis has been placed upon the actual process of translation.⁶ Although the well-known “History of Joseph Smith” recounts Joseph Smith’s explanation of the device found with the plates as being composed of two stones, most artists’ renderings depicting these events generally excluded images of the stones entirely, and no attempts were made to show the stones being used in the way witnesses described. These artists’ paintings powerfully conveyed an image to modern Latter-day Saints of Joseph Smith sitting at a table with the plates in front of him, his finger running over the top of the characters, with Oliver Cowdery dutifully seated across from him taking the dictation down. Thus generations of Mormons have come to imagine the translation process in much the same way reflected in these portrayals, a process by which the miracle of translation occurred by Joseph Smith looking at the plates and speaking a translation to Cowdery without the use of any external tools or the seer stones themselves, despite the testimonies of witnesses that the process occurred very differently. Those witnesses make the use of the stones the central aspect of the translation. They give an account of Joseph Smith placing various seer stones into a hat in order to block out the external light. Then God caused words to appear on the shining stones that translated the reformed Egyptian text into English.

Those who are antagonistic toward the Church and Joseph Smith have used this discrepancy between witnesses of the translation and average members of the Church as a cudgel to beat upon the faith of believers. The very use of these witness statements by antagonistic or disrespectful authors or television programs to create a deprecating image of Joseph Smith has further alienated members from a proper understanding of the translation process. These detractors highlight the apparent ridiculousness of a scene that involves Joseph translating with his head buried in a “magic” hat, knowing that such imagery would offend the sensibilities of twenty-first-century Mormons.

Although the witnesses’ explanations of the translation process differ from what is generally understood by Church members, the testimonies of these witnesses affirm that the use of the seer stones—placed as they were in a hat to block out the light so the words of God could be read—was the greatest evidence to them of the miraculous nature of the translation. Detractors make light of the translation process. However, they do so without informing their readers that their very sources for such apparently disdainful evidence stated that because of the use of a seer stone in the translation process, they had a greater testimony of the seership of Joseph Smith.

One way we attempt to deal with the problem of the inaccurate portrayal of the translation process is by adding depictions of the translation to this book. These images were created by Anthony Sweat, assistant professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University. In addition to skillfully crafted artwork of the events surrounding the translation that more closely align with the testimonies of scribes and witnesses, Sweat has performed detailed and informative research on how images of the translation have been used over time. The appendix of this book contains his exclusive essay, “By the Gift and Power of Art,” which will help readers understand where the more well-known images of the translation originated and how their less accurate depictions have come to dominate the LDS imagination when considering the translation of the gold plates.

Our book attempts to capture the first-person point of view of Joseph Smith and those who witnessed the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. Though we have taken into account the perspectives of detractors and nonbelievers in our analysis, the purpose of our book is to understand the coming forth of the Book of Mormon as a miracle, which can best be understood through the accounts of those closest to the process and by those who believed. To Joseph Smith and his friends and family, the miraculous translation process was a reality. In other words, our approach asks the question “How would Joseph and his family explain to others the translation process?”

Each of the chapters presented in our book offers new material, both in sources and in interpretation. In a mostly narrative format, we examine the primary events in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon from September 1827 to September 1830—only occasionally pausing to note significant changes in the story. This book is intended to bring the reader closer to the most important events in this chronology of events through the eyes of those who experienced them. Its scope does not include larger topics such as the influence of broader religious cultures, nor does it generally attempt to place the coming forth of the Book of Mormon within the context of national trends, politics, or Protestantism, except in those times when it is clear that those broader influences were cognizant to Joseph Smith and his colleagues. This does not mean that we do not contextualize and historicize each account to understand it better, but we do attempt to let those closest to Joseph Smith be heard in their own words, while acknowledging that they had their own biases reflected in their accounts and interpretations.

In many ways, our book is an attempt to recapture the religious value of the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon in the minds of believing members. We are not making claims or an argument about the reality of the plates, nor are we making arguments about the historicity of the plates, which can be found in other publications. Instead, this book tries to get at the heart of what Joseph Smith and those closest to him believed about the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon.

Nevertheless, no work of history nor any examination of sources that speak of heavenly manifestations and the visitations of angels can demonstrate the reality of these miraculous events. Miracles are by definition events that cannot be replicated by mortal beings absent of the intervention of God. In this sense, logic and historical method cannot fully prove or disprove the miraculous claims made by Joseph Smith or the scribes who worked with him on the translation. Just as one cannot prove with historical sources or scientific inquiry alone the reality of Jesus Christ’s Resurrection or of the efficacy of his Atonement to save men and women from sin and death, faith and belief are the necessary ingredients for one to come to know that Joseph Smith was a prophet of God and that he performed the work of a seer in bringing forth the words of the Book of Mormon from darkness unto light. What historians can demonstrate, however, is how the witnesses to these events explained them, how they understood them, and how they came to believe, as Wilford Woodruff did, that Joseph Smith had been called by God to translate gold plates and publish that translation as the Book of Mormon.

Notes

^1. Wilford Woodruff Journals, 2 November 1845, MS 1352, box 1, folder 1, Church History Library, Salt Lake City; original spelling preserved.

^2. Woodruff, Journal, 2 November 1845, MS 1352, box 1, folder 1, Church History Library.

^3. Woodruff, Journal, 27 December 1841, MS 1352, box 1, folder 2, Church History Library.

^4. “Golden Bible,” Palmyra Freeman, 11 August 1829.

^5. Woodruff, Journal, 28 November 1841, MS 1352, box 1, folder 2, Church History Library.

^6. Times and Seasons 3, no. 9 (1 March 1842).

 

The plates, breastplate, and spectacles in the Hill Cumorah. Watercolor by Anthony Sweat.