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. Welcome to this edition of Viewpoint on Mormonism. I'm your host, Bill McKeever, founder and director of Mormonism Research Ministry. With me today is Eric Johnson, my colleague at MRM, but we also have with us Sandra Tanner, the founder of Utah Lighthouse Ministry. If you want to check out their website, it's utlm.org. This week we have been looking at Joseph Smith as a translator, and today we want to begin looking at the Kinderhook plates.
I'm going to let you describe what this is all about. What are the Kinderhook plates? How did Joseph Smith come about getting a hold of these, and what did he do with them?
What did he claim about them? Well, in 1843, this is when the Mormons are in Nauvoo. It's the year before Joseph dies. Some non-Mormon fellows evidently decided to pull a prank on the Mormons, and they put together a set of these little brass, small bell-shaped plates that they etched with wax on the plates and then etched in the characters and then poured acid on it. To burn the characters into the plates. And they made this set of phony plates that they dug a hole and hid them in.
And then the one fellow tells everyone that, oh, he'd had a dream for three nights about some treasure out in the woods to go out and dig up. And he gets some other guys and a Mormon guy to come along when they go out to make this dig. And they dig down a number of feet and then come across these plates. So everyone's impressed that these are authentic writings found in the ground, and they bring them out and clean them off.
They're full of, covered with rust and everything. And they take them to Joseph Smith to see what he has to say about them. The Mormons immediately latch onto this as another proof of Joseph Smith's story that there were these people in the Americas different than the American Indian and that there was this whole other civilization. And so when the plates are taken to Joseph, he looks at them and according to the account in their documentary history of the church, Joseph is reported as saying, I have translated a portion of them and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found.
He was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth. Now, while it's put in the history of the church as though it's Joseph Smith speaking, we know now that this is an extract from Joseph's secretary, William Clayton, who kept extensive accounts of Joseph's day-to-day life. One of several Mormons around Joseph Smith that kept diaries and the church utilizes William Clayton's diary in putting together the history of Joseph Smith's life. And so Clayton's account of this was put into the history of the church as though Joseph Smith said it in the first person. Even so, although the Mormons will bring out that, well, Clayton was the one that recorded it, not Joseph Smith, you have to remember that Clayton was his personal secretary, his bosom buddy, and Clayton is used for all sorts of historical verification in looking at things he wrote in his journals.
And that's why they use this in the history of the church because he was accurately trying to represent what Joseph said from day to day. So the question comes up when Joseph Smith is looking at these plates and he gives this information that he can see on these plates that this is a record of the person that they were found with and that he's a descendant of Ham from Pharaoh from Egypt. Then you have to ask, where does the information come from? Because we know now that the plates are forgeries. There was no message on the plates.
It's just chicken scratches. And so there's no way for this kind of information to come about other than Joseph Smith's invention and his great imagination. In spite of the fact that Joseph didn't pen it, he didn't write hardly anything. Almost everything he did was written by some scribe and then put into his language as though he were the one that authored it. He didn't write the Doctrine and Covenants. That's a scribe sitting there taking his dictation. He didn't write out the Book of Mormon. It was a scribe writing it down.
Everything is done by scribes. So the fact that Clayton writes it down to me is irrelevant. Clayton was not one to invent something and put words in Joseph's mouth. He says Joseph declared that these were from a descendant of Ham. And Joseph has to come up with this by invention because there's no information on these plates to get it from. So then the question comes up, were the plates authentic? Could he have really got this information from the plates or is he just doing a quick invention of a new supposed translation? The statement where Joseph Smith claims it's the history of the person with whom they were found. Apparently this was an Indian burial mound and they allegedly dig down and they placed these plates there and they were near a skeleton.
There's confusion as to how tall this person would have been based on the skeletal remains and I don't know if that's a real argument against it because there was a chapter in a book titled Producing Ancient Scripture. It was edited by Michael Hubbard McKay, Mark Ashurst McGee, which you know because he's a relative of yours, and Brian M. Hoglid. There was a chapter, chapter 17, that dealt with the Kinderhook plates. It was titled President Joseph Has Translated a Portion and then subtitled Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates.
This was written by Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst McGee. I went through this chapter, Sandra, and it was kind of anti-climactic to tell you the truth because they're laying out all this evidence and I thought they did a lot of very excellent research and getting all the background and all the names and it actually gets a little bit confusing with all the names and dates and so forth. But they seem to admit, as this title says, that President Joseph has translated a portion.
Now we know that the Kinderhook plates were fabricated. They're not ancient. Doesn't it seem like, based on that statement, that Joseph must have thought they were authentic to say that he could even translate a portion of them and give us that kind of information? It sounds like Joseph Smith, his interest in Egyptology is now going to permeate this as well.
Everything is all about Egypt, it seems, with Joseph Smith, which was not unusual in the entire country at that time. But what does that tell us? If he can supposedly translate—and again, we're using that with quotation marks—as you said, gibberish, what does that say about him as a prophet? He can easily be fooled, apparently.
Or he has a very clever imagination and takes advantage of any opportunity to promote his claim of having prophetic abilities. So he puts this to these people around him as though this was something valid, real information that he's giving about these plates. And yet we know now that he couldn't retrieve any information from those plates.
He could know nothing about that skeleton that was in the hill by the side of the plates. None of that checks out, which they can see today that none of it checks out. So then they have to do a smoothing over of the word translate. Obviously, he couldn't translate a portion of them. But what does it say about the man? That he can so quickly, on the spot, come up with a story that impresses everyone with, oh my goodness, wow, what a discovery. But this is the story of Joseph Smith's life. He can walk across the hill in Missouri and see a pile of rocks and determine it's Adam's altar. He just comes up with stories on this spur of the moment of whatever happens around him. He spins a great event out of it. I mean, the hill in his backyard is not just any hill. It's a hill where they had battles of millions of people fighting. Well, let me read a portion from chapter 17 in this book, Producing Ancient Scripture.
And I've got to be quite honest, I find the title to be intriguing. Producing Ancient Scripture, which gives the impression he's inventing this. He's making this up. This is what the authors Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst McGee say on page 453 of the book, Producing Ancient Scripture. They write, decades later, one of the men who was present when the plates were disinterred revealed that the plates and their quote unquote discovery were a hoax. Wilburn Fugett claimed that he and Robert Wiley had made the plates with some help from local blacksmith Bridge Whitten, and then planted them in the burial mound the night before they were unearthed. In 1980, scientific testing confirmed the modern manufacture of the plates. It seems like a lot of Mormon scholars, Mormon apologists, Mormons in general, felt that these plates were authentic. And it wasn't until really 1980 when it was confirmed by modern testing that these were manufactured.
They were more of a modern invention, a 19th century invention. Why would they want to insist that these plates were authentic for so long? Well, they felt it was another proof of the Book of Mormon claim of outsiders coming to the new world and establishing a civilization here. So finding these plates, if they truly were about someone, a descendant from Ham from Egypt, that it would go to prove the Book of Mormon could be an ancient record of a group of people that came here as well.
So they saw this all as vindication for it. And for years, the Mormon Church had maintained the plates were authentic, even when it was revealed that the men claimed that it was a forgery. Even after it came out that they admitted it was a forgery, the church maintained, no, they're authentic and they do help to prove the Book of Mormon. But then in about the 70s, as the subject started receiving more attention, the one surviving plate was tested without destroying any of the metal to see how it conformed to modern production or ancient production. And when it was looked at at that point, they found that the thickness of the plates were of such a consistent depth all across the plate that it would have to be rolled metal, modern production, because you couldn't have had that uniformity of thickness through all of the plates unless it was a modern production. Then they also looked at the punch hole for the ring that went through it. And the punch hole was determined to have been made by a modern metal punch because of the way it pushes through the metal that it would not be an ancient hole. But we still didn't have a test of the metal.
And so people could still maintain, oh, no, they really are authentic, that those measurements don't count. So then you get up to 1980, then finally the Mormons were able to get approval from the Chicago Museum that owns the plate to actually do a metal test. And when they looked at the alloy of the metal, it was obvious it was a modern composition. It couldn't represent an ancient composition of the metal. It was obviously a fraud.
It was firmly concluded that everyone admitted then that it was a fraud. So then the argument has to shift from, oh, they're authentic and they happen to help prove the Book of Mormon. Then it shifts to, all right, they were frauds, but that has nothing to do with any detriment to Joseph Smith because he didn't really translate them. Let's talk about that in tomorrow's show. We've been talking with Sandra Tanner, the founder of Utah Lighthouse Ministry. Check out their website, utlm.org. We hope you will join us again as we look at another viewpoint on Mormonism.
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