Review of Witnesses movie Part 3

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You can find these informative articles at CrashCourseMormonism.com. That's CrashCourseMormonism.com. Viewpoint on Mormonism, the program that examines the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints from a biblical perspective. Viewpoint on Mormonism is sponsored by Mormonism Research Ministry. Since 1979, Mormonism Research Ministry has been dedicated to equipping the body of Christ with answers regarding the Christian faith in a manner that expresses gentleness and respect. And now, your host for today's Viewpoint on Mormonism. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism.

I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry, and with me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM. We are looking at the film called Witnesses. It was released on June 4th, 2021, and of course it is supposed to be a faith-promoting film that has been put out by the Interpreter Foundation, whose president is Dr. Daniel C. Peterson, a BYU professor who strongly believes that the testimony of the three witnesses carries a lot of weight when it comes to the actual existence of the gold plates that Joseph Smith claimed the angel Moroni gave him in 1827 and were eventually translated into what is known today as the Book of Mormon. Getting back to the actual sequence of the film, it kind of jumps back and forth. It opens with a scene of David Whitmer being pulled from his house, and there's an angry mob there wanting him to recant.

And then the scene changes and you have an older David Whitmer. The date says 1881, and this supposedly takes place in Richmond, Missouri, where David Whitmer lived at the time. He's approached by a man whose character is given the name of, I believe it's Edwin Kelly.

Whether that person really exists, I have no idea. It's not important, but he supposedly represents the Richmond Democrat newspaper. He has with him a newspaper, and he reads from that newspaper an interview that David Whitmer gave to a man by the name of John Murphy. Whitmer feels that Murphy has misrepresented some of the things that he said in that interview, and so this reporter is wanting, quote-unquote, the truth. By citing the Murphy interview, some of these things get brought up, and we're hoping that David Whitmer is going to clarify them.

But there was one thing that was interesting, and this is what I found kind of fascinating in this film. I have for years had some pretty serious disagreements with this story. The weight of the plates, the metal of the plates, and how Mormon apologists have responded to them. I think their arguments are horrible. I think their rebuttals are horrible. But I've noticed that many times in talking about the gold plates, many of my rebuttals aren't discussed by Mormon apologists.

This film seems to include some of my arguments, and they're just not unique with me. Others have seen the same things that I have seen. But one of them is brought out by this reporter, where in this account he talks about, so Joseph Smith, and I'm paraphrasing, he's holding these plates with one arm and he's fighting off three attackers. I've actually used those exact words in presentations that I've given in churches, and I find it to be quite miraculous, if you will, that Joseph Smith could do that, but that's what we're supposed to believe. Now I know some Mormons think that there was a miracle involved that enabled Joseph Smith to do just that, to hold on to these heavy gold plates while fighting off three attackers at three separate times, and yet he's able to knock them down with such force that he's allowed to run away from these attackers with the plates, and foiling their attempts to steal the plates from him. Now it's interesting, the film doesn't bring out that Joseph Smith had a limp, and he had that limp for much of his life after he had surgery on his leg. It does mention, though, that the plates were 50 pounds.

It says that specifically in the film. Now I personally, I scoff at that, because the only way you can get these gold plates down to 50 pounds is by, one, changing the metal from gold to another alloy, and I know Dr. Peterson believes in that, that they weren't made of pure gold, but if the plates were made of an alloy, you have to ask yourself, why does the angel refer to them as gold plates? And they were referred to as gold plates throughout the film, although as we mentioned, there was a couple of places where it talked about golden plates. The scene of him being interviewed by this reporter, and when he brings up the subject of gold plates, what does the character, David Whitmer, say in response to that? He says, gold or brass or tin, it makes no difference.

But you see, folks, it does make a difference. It makes a difference because the angel said they were gold plates. If the angel existed at all in this story, we cannot discount what the angel actually said and how Joseph Smith recorded him. The angel says the plates were made of gold. They could not have been made of tin.

Tin would not survive being buried in the ground for that long. So if you don't want to believe it's gold, you have to come up with some kind of metal that is going to endure being buried in the ground in the climate that Palmyra, New York has. We should go right straight to Joseph Smith's own words. This is Joseph Smith History, chapter 1, verse 34.

This is found in the Standard Works. In the Pearl of Great Price, it says Joseph Smith is writing, and he's referring to the angel. He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent. So according to the angel, as you mentioned, according to LDS scripture, gold is the material that was used. Now I understand that in the making of this film, naturally, they had a couple of props. They had a lighter set of gold plates and a heavier set of gold plates.

In looking at pictures that are on the internet, these scenes that I've seen on the internet were not in the film, so I'm taking it that these pictures were just done on the set, didn't make their way into the film. But you can clearly see the prop representing the gold plates. It's interesting because they don't look like they're all metal. It looks very similar to that phony set of gold plates that the Church History Museum pulls out and lets people lift, telling people that they're 50 pounds, even though you can clearly see that what you're lifting is not something that's made entirely of metal plates. Most of it looks like a chunk of plaster, probably wrapped around a brick of some sort. I don't really even know what the material is, but only a portion of that display are made of actual metal plates.

This film has something very similar to it. When you look at the picture, now it's hard to see in the movie because everything's happening so fast, but the photographs that you can find on the web clearly show what these plates, this prop, looks like. It doesn't look like it's all metal plates, at least not the size that Joseph Smith described of being six inches by eight inches by six inches deep. Why does it make a difference, the weight of the plates? Well, a big reason is Joseph Smith is seen carrying these plates in the movie as if they really are no weight at all. And as you have documented so many times, gold weighs 1,200 pounds per cubic foot, and six by eight by six, as you mentioned, is a six of a cubic foot. That would make it 200 pounds.

So what do you have to do? Somehow you're going to have to make it 40 or 50 pounds, which still would be a very difficult weight. But the way that the movie portrays it, if I'm somebody who doesn't know very much at all, you just say, oh, okay, he was just carrying these plates.

It's not a problem. He puts them under his arm. He fights off these attackers. But he could not do that even with 50 pounds. But with 200 pounds, the illustration that you do on the streets, Bill, is perfect because you're using sheet metal the same size. It's going to be about 80 pounds. And that's an incredible amount just by itself to have it be 200 pounds. You can't have that.

But you wouldn't know about this controversy watching this movie. But as the film says, the plates weigh about 50 pounds. Well, I happen to have a set of plates that are 50 pounds, 53, I think exactly, because that's the number that a Mormon metallurgist by the name of Reed Putnam came up with. I think he said 53 pounds.

And that's where I got that. When you pick up my 53 pounds worth of plates and they're only about four inches thick, they're six inches by eight by four inches deep. They're heavy. They're extremely heavy. And when I have people pick up my 50 pound plates, I don't have them on a wooden stand where they can easily stick their fingers underneath it. They have to pick them up as they lie.

And then they're very awkward. And I'll tell you something, having carried my own plates around that are 53 pounds and I'm watching that actor in the film, they're not the same. Whatever he's carrying is not 50 pounds. If you want to get a good idea of how much this is going to weigh, go to the Utah Lighthouse Bookstore that's in Salt Lake City across the street from the ballpark.

Sandra Tanner has lead plates of the same size and those weigh one hundred and eighteen pounds. I had some people in there recently and they were trying to pick them up and they they said, are these nailed down? Are these screwed into the table? No, they're not. I think this is important for people to understand that the movie very clearly says that they're gold. In fact, there's one scene where the question is asked, why not just show them to everyone, Joseph? And he says they're gold. People would try to steal them.

And when he says that in the film, you can't help but chuckle, at least under your breath. Wait a minute. You just showed a scene of men trying to steal them and he didn't put them on display. But somehow the word got out.

And who knows where that came from? Could have come from Martin Harris, could have been Joseph Smith who leaked the story. But apparently evil men knew that he had some kind of gold plates and they wanted to steal them even though they had not seen such plates.

So I don't know if that argument really helps the case here. But we heard something very similar at the conference center across from Temple Square. We asked a lady about that very thing. Why would it be a problem to put the plates on display? Well, can you imagine what you would have to do to protect those gold plates? Well, yeah, that would be worth quite a bit of money. But then there's a lot of valuable material on Temple Square in the museum.

There are several museums throughout the world that have very valuable artifacts on display and somehow they're able to protect those artifacts. So I don't know if that's a really good argument to say, well, why don't we have the plates and they needed to be taken back by the angel? It just seems to make Joseph Smith's story seem less credible.

There's no example of any of these kind of artifacts available for us today to examine. We have to go purely on the word of Joseph Smith. And as a Christian examining Joseph Smith's life, teachings and character, I would say that's a pretty dangerous thing to do, is to trust in someone like Joseph Smith.

As I feel it's dangerous to trust in men like Martin Harris, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer. Why would I want to place my trust in them just because they seem to verify this book that in and of itself is problematic, has teachings in there that as a Christian I find highly offensive and doctrine that is not only bad news, it certainly is not the gospel. It has requirements in the Book of Mormon that I've not found any Latter-day Saint to be living up to. Why would you want to have this book be something from God? Because if the Book of Mormon is true and we're going to be judged by the words in that book, then how is anyone going to be saved? I just don't see why a person would want to do that. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.