Scott Woodward:
After four years of waiting, learning, and personal refinement, 21-year-old Joseph Smith was finally entrusted by the angel Moroni with the ancient record that for centuries had lain in waiting in a stone box embedded in a hill near his home. Recalling this time years later, Joseph said that almost as soon as he had received the plates “the most strenuous exertions were used to get them from me. Every stratagem that could be invented was resorted to for that purpose. The persecution became more bitter and severe than before, and multitudes were on the alert continually to get them from me if possible.” In today’s episode we take a closer look at what we know of these efforts to get the plates from Joseph and the surprising supernatural means his antagonists resorted to in their attempts to do so. We also dive into Joseph’s initial creative efforts in 1828 to get the record translated, including creating an Egyptian alphabet from the engravings on the plates, as well as sending Martin Harris to New York to recruit linguistic experts to help in translating the book. And although these secular translation efforts ultimately failed, the lessons learned through this experience continue to offer value to us today. All of this and more coming your way on today’s episode of Church History Matters, a podcast of Scripture Central. I’m Scott Woodward, a managing director at Scripture Central, and my co-host is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central, and today, Casey and I dive into our second episode in this series dealing with the coming forth of The Book of Mormon. Now let’s get into it. Hi, Casey.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hi, Scott, good to see you.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, we’re here into episode two, talking about the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Excited to dig deeper with you on this. We are exploring in this series the marvelous, shocking, utterly unique story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. I think that’s what we’re calling it in this series: The marvelous, shocking, utterly unique story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. We talked just a bit last time about how before God does anything else in the restoration project to really get things going, he starts out with a boy and a book. And that’s what’s going to lead to the revolutionizing the whole world, eventually, according to prophecy, so Casey you want to give us a recap of what we talked about last time?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Absolutely. So last time was kind of a prelude to this. We talked about the first vision and then three years what comes along is what we call the second vision. Moroni appears to Joseph Smith the night of September 21, 1823. And the following day Joseph goes to a nearby hill and finds or sees for the first time the plates. He doesn’t get them at that time. There’s a lot of ups and downs. He has basically four years from 1823 to 1827 where he goes through kind of his apprenticeship period, though I would say the entire translation of the Book of Mormon is sort of Joseph Smith’s apprenticeship period. And then, finally, he goes to the hill on September 22, 1827. And that is when he gets the plates. That’s where we left the discussion. So it’s Joseph and Emma at the hill. Emma is at the bottom of the hill in Joseph Knight’s wagon. She’s the getaway driver. Joseph has gone up the hill to get the plates, and let’s dive into it from there.

Scott Woodward:
I sometimes like to think of that four-year period—so he’s 17 years old to 21 years old—I sometimes call that Joseph’s four-year education. He went to the University of Moroni. And his teacher was out-of-this-world good. We know that he also, he mentions just in passing, that he had also met other angels during this time period, right, who may have been those from the Book of Mormon time period. Some tutoring, some training. I mean, the University of Moroni or the University of Cumorah or I don’t know what to call it, but he had his four-year education there. And I remember a key point we talked about last time was that as Lucy Mack said it, all of this was preparation, not just so that Joseph could be more willing, but actually able to keep the Lord’s commandments. His capacity needed to grow to keep the commandments that God had given to him. And so I just love that because as you think about all the teenagers, you know, there are so many great teenagers that are willing to keep the commandments. But they’re just not fully, it seems like, able to consistently, right. Oh, and that’s kind of like a lot of 20-year-olds I know, and 30-year-olds, and 40. I mean, this is—this is a human thing, right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Everybody, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That sometimes we need some time to grow in our capacity to keep the commandments. And let’s be patient with each other. I know that God is patient with us as we grow in our capacity. So anyway, just a takeaway for me as I study this is that God is patient as we learn to grow in our capacity to keep the commandments. So all right, well, today the big question that we want to discuss is “What happens next?” What happens after Joseph receives the plates, Emma in the wagon and driving the getaway vehicle? What happens then? You know, there seems to be a pretty big gap between when Joseph first receives the plates, 1827 September, and when the book is actually translated and published? Like, the Book of Mormon isn’t fully translated until what? June 1829, and it isn’t published until March of 1830. So what happens between September 1827, when he gets the plates, and March 1830, when the book is published? That’s two and a half years. Do you wanna start us off Casey? What happens once he gets the plates?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Oof, lots of ups and downs. And Joseph Smith deals with this briefly in his 1838 history. For instance, he says, “At length the time arrived for obtaining the plates, the Urim and Thummim and the breastplate, on the 22nd day of September 1827. The same heavenly messenger delivered them up to me with this charge, that I should be responsible for them. If I should let them go carelessly or through any neglect of mine, I should be cut off. But that if I would use all my endeavors to preserve them until he, the messenger, should call for them, they should be protected.” Then Joseph Smith makes this huge understatement where he says, “No sooner was it known that I had them than the most strenuous exertions were used to get them from me. Every stratagem that could be invented was resorted to for that purpose. The persecution became more bitter and severe than before, and multitudes were on the alert continually to get them from me if possible.” Now, the reason why I say that’s a huge understatement is the sources we have on just the difficulties he has after he gets the plates are innumerable. Multiple members of the Smith family talk about this. There’s people in Palmyra that mention it. And from the night he gets the plates, it is crazy. We talked about this a little bit last time, but the hill where the plates are located is in close proximity to Joseph Smith’s family farm. And so in the Palmyra area, there’s a lot of people that know about Joseph Smith, that have heard rumors about the plates. And apparently there are some people that know particulars about when and where he’s going to be with the plates. So first thing that happens is he doesn’t bring the plates home on September 22nd. According to his own history and his mother, he hides the plates in the woods between the Smith house and the hill. And people are searching, trying to find, to steal the plates. Lucy Mack says, “It now seemed that Satan had stirred up the hearts of those who had in any way got a hint of the matter to search into it and make every possible move towards preventing the work.” In fact, an interesting episode takes place here that sometimes gets looked over. When Joseph doesn’t bring the plates home, Lucy Mack actually asks him, How are you not going crazy? Not knowing where those plates are every single minute. According to her reminiscence, Joseph Smith saw that she was distressed and said, It’s all right, I have a key that lets me know that the record is safe. She then said, “I knew not what he meant, but took the article into my hands, and examining it with no covering, but a silk handkerchief, found that it consisted of two smooth, three-quartered diamonds set in a glass inside silver bows.” So apparently when she says, how are you not going crazy, not knowing where the record is at all times, Joseph hands her the Nephite interpreters. They’re in a silk handkerchief, but she is probably the first person besides him to actually physically hold them and to give a description of them, and apparently Joseph Smith was able to use the interpreters to know that the record is safe. And that is a common theme in the narrative while they’re in the Palmyra area, which is really only from September until December of 1827, is that there’s constantly people that are trying to get the plates. Joseph Smith is continually warned if the plates are in danger, and he has to keep moving them, which is great when it comes to miraculous witnesses of Joseph Smith’s prophetic abilities, but bad when it comes to translation. Joseph can’t get any translation done because there’s too much stuff going on in Palmyra. He eventually has to leave. So let me just give you a quick rundown on some of the things that Smith family members said happened.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Yeah. Tell us, tell us some stories. Tell us some stories.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
OK. So Joseph eventually goes to get the plates. He goes and retrieves them from the hiding place in the woods. On his way home he is attacked three different times, OK? Joseph says he’s traveling down the main road but aware that people are trying to steal the plates. He ducks off and instead choose to travel through the woods. He said on his way I was accosted by a man who demanded the plates and struck him with a club at his side. Joseph pivots, he knocks the man to the ground, and then he runs away as quickly as he can, all while he’s carrying this record, which most of the witnesses say weighed about 50 pounds or so. He makes it about a half mile, gets attacked again. I love in some recent movies like the “Witnesses” movies, they show him, like, using the plates to knock people down, which isn’t in the sources, but could happen.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I sometimes like to joke that whoever Joseph hit with the plates, that was the very first person that the Book of Mormon ever made an impression on right there. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
It had an impact for sure.

Scott Woodward:
It had an impact. And doesn’t he punch a guy and dislocate his thumb while he was defending himself?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yes, that’s the third attack.

Scott Woodward:
OK.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
So he gets attacked once, guy with a club. Gets attacked a second time a half mile later. Knocks that guy down, runs on. A third time, before he gets to the house, he gets attacked, and he strikes his attacker so forcefully that he dislocates his thumb. This is according to Lucy Mack Smith. 

Scott Woodward:
I like to joke that that’s the very first instance of the first laying on of hands that we have in this dispensation. Right there is a…

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Scott, you’re on fire today. I don’t wanna stop you. 

Scott Woodward:
I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry. I keep interrupting.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
No, no, no, you’re fine. Is this a story or is there evidence of this? Joseph Smith’s sister, Katharine, for instance, said she remembered him getting to the house nearly exhausted, carrying a package of the gold plates clasped to his side with his left hand and arm, and his right hand was badly bruised. Joseph hands the plates through the window. He’s—he’s so worried he doesn’t even make it to the front door. He runs to the window, hands them through to Josiah Stowell. That’s the guy who hired Joseph Smith to find the Spanish gold mine or silver mine in Pennsylvania. And he’s the first person besides Joseph Smith, first mortal to handle the plates, bring them in. And actually over the next couple of weeks, it’s kind of interesting because there’s all these attempts to find the plates, but actually the Smith family, for the most part, knew where the plates were and had these experiences with them. For instance, Lucy says, “Joseph could ascertain the approach of danger either to himself or the record and for this cause he kept these things constantly about his person.” She’s talking about the the Nephite interpreters. So a couple things happen: Joseph is working on the farm with his dad when he gets an alert. He gets a notification, I guess we’d say, that a group of hostile men are approaching this stone. Joseph, before the men can get there, goes and removes the hearthstone near the fireplace and dug a hole underneath large enough to hold the plates and wooden box they were being stored in. They put the plates there. Then, as the men come towards the house, they devise a plan to startle the adversaries where Joseph and his brothers run out the door, screaming at the top of their lungs. This startles the men, causes them to flee. Meanwhile, while they [the plates] are in the house, other Smith family members have experiences with them. Katharine Smith said she saw the plates sitting on the table, wrapped in a linen cloth. She said she picked them up, they were heavy like gold. She also said, she “rippled her fingers up the edge of the plates and felt that they were separate metal plates and heard the tinkle of the sound they made.” And so, Katharine Smith, we don’t always talk about, first female witness of the Book of Mormon to actually handle the plates and get the opportunity to kind of rustle them, though she—she, like, Emma Smith later on, kind of sees the plates within this linen cloth. Other people, William, Joseph Smith’s little brother—he was a teenager when all this is happening—said he hefted the plates as they lay on the table wrapped in an old frock or jacket in which Joseph had brought them home. Other weird things that happen: One of the weird things that we don’t always talk about is how did those three men that attacked Joseph Smith know where he’s at? According to Lucy Mack Smith, they hired a guy, using an alternate seer stone. That’s how they knew the route Joseph Smith was going to take to the house. Later on, Samuel Lawrence, who’s another local from Palmyra, comes to the Smith home and demands the plates. When Joseph says, no you can’t have the plates, he returns with another man who has a divining rod. This divining rod person apparently uses his rod and finds where the plates are located, goes to the cooper shop where they had moved the plates to. Joseph Smith had set up a decoy there. He’d taken the plates out of the box that they kept them in. The guy finds the box but doesn’t find the plates. And so a lot of interesting stuff is going. And imagine you’re a Smith child, like, this would be really terrifying. For instance, on one occasion, Katharine Smith told her granddaughter that there was an evening when a group of men just barged into the Smith home and started looking around for the plates. Joseph actually saw the men coming. He takes the plates, he wraps them up and hands them to Katharine. According to Katharine, he told her, “Take these quickly and hide them.” Katharine goes and takes her sister, Sophronia, they go to a bedroom near the kitchen. They got into bed and they pulled back the covers, and the girls pretend to be asleep while the men come in and search the house. In fact, she said one of them even came into their bedroom and shined a lantern at them, but when they failed to find the plates, they left, leaving the two girls undisturbed. 

Scott Woodward:
Wow.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Long story short, things are intense in Palmyra. Too intense, probably, for Joseph Smith to have a lot of time to sit down and start translation, and so eventually he decides, I’ve got to get out of Palmyra. And the next and most logical place to go is where Emma’s from, to go to Emma’s hometown. So, I mean, when Joseph Smith says, the most strenuous efforts were used to get them from me, this is what we’re talking about. Like, day-to-day, just harassment, family being threatened, but also a wonderful opportunity for the Smith family to handle the plates if they don’t get to see them.

Scott Woodward:
Wow. What an intense few months. So, just to recap what you said, he’s got the Urim and Thummim with him, or the Nephite interpreters on his person at all times, and there would be alerts of some kind that would occur on the Urim and Thummim to warn him to move the plates or to to say that someone’s coming to try to get him, and then that’s how he was able to then move the plates around just to stay a step ahead of the would-be thieves. And those thieves had actually been using other sort of mystical means to try to locate them, and actually successfully did so a few times—were able to know where they were under the hearth of the fireplace or out in the Cooper shop. Even where Joseph would be the night that he brought the plates home from the hollowed out log, they knew where he was going to be. And you’re saying this is because of some guy that they had hired who had access to some alternate seer stones or some sort of divining rod, is that right?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Lucy Mack Smith says they hired a conjurer—

Scott Woodward:
A conjurer. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s the word she uses—from 60 miles away. And that’s how the people that attack Joseph Smith are able to know where he’s at that night. And so we’re going to talk a little bit about seer stones when we get to the actual mechanics of translation. But these stories, as much as anything, illustrate how seer stones and divining rods and kind of this folk magic that seems so strange to us, she just mentions, like, oh yeah, they hired a guy who was able to tell them Joseph’s location. And it sounds like it works, but a constant theme in Lucy Mack’s reminiscences, in Katharine’s, in everybody—in William’s reminiscences—is that Joseph was kind of always one step ahead. That he kept the Nephite interpreters nearby and he was able to, I don’t know, get a notification when the plates were in danger and constantly kept moving them. But in the flow of the story here, this is why most of the translation doesn’t take place in Palmyra. There’s just too much going on there and too many people that are intent on getting the plates.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, there’s no evidence that any translation happened in Palmyra, if I understand correctly. Is that your understanding? I don’t know of any translation that occurred there.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, I think Joseph Smith mentions in his history that he spends a couple weeks studying the plates and learning the characters. He’s kind of laying the groundwork to translate. But I think that’s right to say that no translation or very little happens in Palmyra because of these intense persecutions that are happening. But I want to add, too, that these intense persecutions kind of testify that there was something really going on. This isn’t a made-up story. There’s people that are on Joseph’s team, like there was an actual set of plates. 

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, there’s a group of people who really believe that he has something. Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. And those people are pro-Joseph’s mission, mostly his family that are assisting him at this point. And then there’s people that are anti-Joseph Smith’s mission that just want the record. All of them create this consistent narrative that Joseph has something and everybody’s trying to get it. But Joseph, at this point, is able to stay one step ahead of them, which is great, but also isn’t conducive to the environment he needs to translate. And to be honest with you, it must have been pretty stressful for Joseph and his family.

Scott Woodward:
Because it’s not safe to stay in Palmyra, nor conducive to translation, Joseph and Emma are going to move down to be by Emma’s parents in Harmony, Pennsylvania, a place where they hope to have peace, a place where Joseph can focus on getting the record translated. His own account in his history in our Pearl of Great Price, says, “The persecution became so intolerable that I was under the necessity of leaving Manchester,” which is that Palmyra, Manchester area, “and going with my wife to Susquehanna County in the state of Pennsylvania. But while preparing to start, being very poor, and the persecution so heavy upon us that there was no probability that we would ever be otherwise, in the midst of our affliction, we found a friend in a gentleman by the name of Martin Harris, who came to us and gave me $50 to assist us on our journey.” So Martin Harris just lives up the way from the Smiths. They had known him. I think Joseph had worked for Martin on his farm. And in fact, when Martin Harris tells the story years later, he’ll say that Joseph wondered who would be able to help Joseph in the translation project or in this bringing forth The Book of Mormon. And Moroni had told him to look in the Urim and Thummim, look in the interpreters. And Joseph looks, and he saw a man, and that man was Martin Harris. And so he sent his mother to Martin Harris’s farm to go and get Martin and to bring him down so that Joseph could talk with him about this project. When Martin first learned about that and started talking with Joseph about this, he said he actually isolated a few different family members to get the story from a few of them to make sure the story was consistent, and then he said that when Joseph told him that he had seen Martin in his Urim and Thummim and that the angel told him to call for him, Martin was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, brother, let’s—let’s take this nice and slow, he said. You have to forgive me, Joseph, for not believing this right away. He said, if what you’re telling me is true, I’d be happy to help with this project, but I would have to know that it’s true. I’m going to have to make this a matter of prayer. And then Martin Harris says that he went home and he made this a matter of prayer. He said he actually knelt down and made a covenant with God, that if God would tell him and show him that what Joseph was telling him was true, that he would dedicate his efforts to helping bring forth this book. And he said, “and the Lord showed me that this was true.” And so now Martin said he considered himself “under covenant” to help Joseph. So when Joseph is trying to find another place to go, and they’ve located Harmony with Emma’s parents, Martin recognized that they’re going to need a little help. And so that’s when he slips them the $50, which in that day, $50 was a lot of bucks.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
A considerable sum. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
And Joseph says they put the plates in a barrel of beans. They announced that they were going to leave, but then they left a day before they had publicly announced it so none of their enemies could waylay them by the way. They had a nice cudgel, just in case Joseph needed to fight off anybody, but they make it down to Harmony without any incident as far as the record says. And so down to Harmony they go. Now to commence the translation. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Let’s keep a timeline in everybody’s head, here, too. So gets the plates in September. By December, he’s realized it’s not going to work to translate in Palmyra. So December is when they go to Harmony, Pennsylvania. They commence translation, we believe in January, and then around February, based on the best sources we can find, this is when Martin has his kind of adventure with the three wise men. We only ever hear about Charles Anthon because he’s the one that’s in Joseph Smith’s 1838 history. But if you patchwork the sources together, it’s clear that Martin doesn’t just go straight to Charles Anthon: that he actually visits three different people. A scholar I work with, Richard Bennett, calls these the “three wise men of the East” because they’re three people that Martin consults to get his witness that Joseph is the real deal. So tell us a little bit about those three wise men.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, okay, so I need to back up a little bit to set the stage of what that story is even all about, because I think we’ve Sometimes got this idea that Martin Harris just—he went east to to show these characters and a translation of them to these wise men to help fulfill a prophecy of Isaiah, right? But actually the truth is more complicated than that. So Joseph arrives in Harmony with Emma in December, and he says in his history that he, “Immediately after my arrival,” so we can actually push this to December, “Immediately after my arrival there I commenced copying the characters off the plates.” He said “I copied a considerable number of the characters.” This he does, he says between the time he arrived “at the house of my wife’s father in the month of December and the February following.” So between December and February he’s copying characters off the plates—a considerable number, he says. Why is he doing that? And then he adds that by means of the Urim and Thummim, I translated some of them, though probably not very many at all, from what Lucy Mack Smith says and what Joseph’s friend Joseph Knight, Sr. says. Joseph is not really confident in his ability to translate at all. In fact, his efforts are pretty haltering. The thing is, Moroni had apparently not given Joseph any instructions on how to translate the plates. And so Joseph’s mom says that he was copying off pages, multiple pages. Joseph’s phrase was “a considerable number of the characters.” We don’t know how many pages of these characters he had copied off, but Joseph’s mom says he was doing this to create an alphabet of sorts. The plan seems to be to create as many characters as—unique characters as he could find on the plates, and then to try to get some help from linguistic experts. So when Martin comes down in February to see how the work is going, Joseph gives him an update and says, well—so at this point Martin had not helped translate at all. Joseph had no scribe. Maybe Emma had helped a little bit. The records are unclear as far as how much effort Emma had put in by February to try to scribe anything, because again we don’t know how much Joseph had actually translated with the Urim and Thummim. Maybe Emma’s brother Reuben had helped with some of the copying the characters off the plates, not that he could see the plates, but that maybe Joseph would do some rubbings where he put some paper on top of the plates, kind of rub it with some charcoal, give that to Reuben and Emma, and they’re helping to sort of transcribe those characters. Again, we’re not sure: The record’s a little vague here, but from what snippets we get, Joseph is very intensely interested in getting many pages of characters and trying to form, Lucy says, an alphabet from which he could then hopefully translate. But the missing piece is he doesn’t know what each character means. When he looks in the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates—again, Moroni didn’t give any instructions on how those stones and the plates are supposed to correlate, and how Joseph is supposed to use those to translate that—so what little translation Joseph does get, some English that’s coming through the stones, he is apparently not at all confident that he is even getting this right. And so the plan, when Martin comes in February to check up on how things are going, Joseph feels like they need some outside expertise. They need to outsource this. In fact, according to Lucy, let me pull up the quotation here:

Casey Paul Griffiths:
While you’re pulling that up too, I want to mention, their house that they’re in while they’re doing this translation is just a couple dozen yards away from the Hale home. And the Hale family, which is sometimes painted as antagonistic, and they do become antagonistic later on, is initially supportive. Joseph and Emma eloped, and apparently Emma’s dad, Isaac, doesn’t like that very much, but when they get there, he asks about the plates, Joseph does hand him the box, according to Isaac Hale. Says you can’t see the plates, but you can lift and heft the box, which Isaac does. Near the end of her life, too, when Emma is asked to list the scribes of the Book of Mormon, she lists herself, she lists Martin Harris, and she lists her brother, Reuben Hale. So they’re in close proximity to the Hales during this phase of the translation process, and that’s another set of witnesses that there’s real things going on here because Isaac and Reuben Hale are both involved, and Emma herself is involved. But go on with your point. You found your quote.

Scott Woodward:
I found the quote. Okay, so Lucy Smith, she says that Joseph took “some measures to accomplish the translation, and he was instructed to take off a facsimile of the characters, and by sending it to learned men, he could acquire a translation of the same.” That’s fascinating. Joseph Knight, Sr. also says the same: that Joseph actually is going to send Martin to the east to meet these three wise men in order to see if he can recruit their help in translating, and so we don’t know how much Martin takes, but he takes some of the characters and apparently a little bit of English translation—Joseph’s shaky, unconfident translation here. “Am I even getting this right? These words, is that correlated to what’s on those plates and these characters?” And so Martin’s trip to New York seems to have been a secular translation recruitment trip. Joseph thought that perhaps he could outsource the translation of the book with the help of linguistic scholars. Joseph Knight Sr. says he was trying to get them translated. Another witness, Jonathan Hadley, says that Joseph explained to him, and he’s an antagonistic source, he doesn’t really believe Joseph for one second, but he said that Joseph told him when he was trying to get Jonathan Hadley to help publish the Book of Mormon, which he ultimately declined, but as Joseph was explaining the story, he said that he sent Martin East to see if he could get the plates “Englished,” that’s what he said, to get them Englished, to get them translated. So we’ve got three sources: We’ve got Lucy, Joseph Knight, Sr., and Jonathan Hadley all saying that what Joseph was really trying to do was recruit some secular help from linguistic scholars. And so that’s why Martin then heads out. So it’s not just Martin going out to fulfill some prophecy of Isaiah. In fact, that never comes up until after the fact when they start putting together, like that totally just happened. But the actual purpose for this trip was, “Help.” Joseph does not feel at all confident to do this. He doesn’t know that language on the plates. He’s got these seer stones that are connected called the Nephite interpreters, but how are these even supposed to work? Are the English words I’m getting even correlated? And so Martin’s going to travel to—first he’s going to stop in Albany. He goes up to Palmyra, we know, gets on the Erie Canal, and then heads over to Albany, where the Erie Canal leads. And that’s where he’s going to meet Luther Bradish. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let me just add real quick here, Scott. 

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, please.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I think my perception was that this trip has always been presented kind of as Martin was skeptical. He didn’t know if Joseph was the real deal. And so he’s doing this out of his sense of skepticism—which might be accurate, but this new dimension, which we’re drawing from some great work done by Mike Hubbard Mackay, who’s a scholar at BYU, is that the sources that we have, which are primarily Joseph and Lucy Mack and Joseph Knight, indicate that yeah, this wasn’t just Martin trying to assuage his doubts. This was Joseph Smith supporting this as well, saying, maybe I’m not the person that’s supposed to translate it. I’m just the custodian of the record. Maybe we need to reach out to these professional scholars and see if they can help.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, that’s right. We’ll link in the show notes to Mike Mackay’s awesome article, and then he’s also got some book-length versions of this. You’re right. His scholarship has been tops on this. And he does mention that that could be maybe a secondary motive for Martin: that, yeah, Martin’s wife is starting to get antagonistic, and that’s going to actually get worse as the story goes on. But his wife is—at first, she was supportive, but then when Joseph wouldn’t show her the plates, she kind of turns on him, and now she’s pooh-poohing Martin’s efforts to try to help Joseph, and this is going to cause a major rift in their marriage. So if he could get some scholarly backing, you know, to kind of bolster his own confidence that this is legit, that could help his marriage. That could also be a strong impetus for his full commitment to helping bring this about, and whatever financial help Joseph might need, this would certainly kind of soften the financial blow if he knows that this is has been verified by outside scholarship. So that’s potentially a secondary motivation for Martin Harris, which would make sense, but Lucy’s clear, and we’re going to talk about prophecy in a minute. In 2 Nephi 27 the prophecy is also clear that the Lord was the one who said “Do this.” In fact, let me—I’ll just read a phrase from the prophecy. 2 Nephi 27:15. “Behold it shall come to pass that the Lord shall”—the Lord God—“shall say unto him to whom he shall deliver the book, Take these words, which are not sealed, and deliver them to another that he may show them unto the learned,” right? The Lord is the one doing this, like, the Lord—this is actually a setup, that the Lord has a purpose in having Joseph give some of these characters that are from the unsealed portion of the Book of Mormon to a man, Martin Harris, to take them to the learned to see if they can read this, right? That’s what the prophecy says, “read this, I pray thee.” And so the Lord wants this to happen, so that’s what is trying to be fulfilled here, right? And so when Martin takes this to the learned, he takes it to three learned men. So, should we talk about those three learning minutes or is there anything else you wanted to say about that?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let’s talk about them. Yeah, you were—you were about to mention Luther Bradish when I interrupted, so tell us about him. He’s in Albany, New York. This is the first person Martin goes to see.

Scott Woodward:
So, yeah, Luther Bradish. He had actually lived in Palmyra for a little while. He was a politician there. But Martin probably visits Bradish to gather information about who to go see. Bradish was well-educated, but he was not a scholar, per se, especially not in Native American languages or anything like that, but Bradish had an interest in classical studies. But as Mike Mackay points out, he didn’t have the scholarly tools to actually evaluate the characters that Harris shows him. Although he—he had been to Turkey, and he, on his passport, he had a Turkish seal, and he looked at the characters that Martin showed him, and he looked at his Turkish passport and he said, it kind of looks similar to some of the Turkish. Again, he’s not really qualified to really weigh in on this, but it’s likely because of Bradish that Harris is pointed in the right direction of where to go next. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Martin’s networking. He probably bounced from Luther Bradish to our second scholar to Charles Anthon, which is his last destination.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, that seems to be what happened. So our second scholar is actually the big deal as far as, like, qualified scholar. He’s a guy named Samuel Mitchell. Samuel Mitchell was actually quite into Native American indigenous languages. He was a prominent member of a society called the American Philosophical Society headquartered in Philadelphia. I think that was started by Thomas Jefferson. It was a group of people that were really interested in the origin story of the Native Americans and trying to figure out their language and those kinds of things. And so it would be a no-brainer for Luther Bradish to recommend Harris go talk to Samuel Mitchell because of his expertise in the study of Native Americans in the New York area, which is exactly the area where Joseph claimed to have found the gold plates. And so, in fact, Mitchell had even come up with the theory that a race of Native Americans in New York was wiped out by another race of Native Americans, which strongly correlates with the Book of Mormon story, as we’ll see later. Of course, Joseph didn’t know that. Nobody knew that because the plates weren’t translated yet. So anyway, Harris claims that he had been told to go to the celebrated Dr. Mitchell and show the characters to him because of his learning in these ancient languages. So Samuel Mitchell was really the most qualified guy. He was a U.S. Senator, he was chair of the Indian Affairs Committee. He’d even learned the Mohawk language early in his career. Anyway, fascinating. So he’s a guy that would be tickled to meet Martin Harris. So when they meet, he looks at those characters, and he seems to suggest that they are authentic. I wish we had an account more detailed from Samuel Mitchell himself or from Martin Harris about what happened there, but all we have is this. We have a newspaper report that Mitchell “looked at his engravings, made a learned dissertation on them, compared them with the hieroglyphics discovered by Champollion in Europe, and set them down as a language of a people formerly in existence in the East, but now no more.” So that is his visit with Samuel Mitchell. Samuel seems to have recommended that he go talk with Charles Anthon. Now, Charles Anthon was not as scholarly qualified as Mitchell was. He was actually not even—he didn’t have linguistic interest in the Native American languages, but he was a Greek and Latin expert. He was just an adjunct professor in 1828. You might scratch your head and say, “Well, why would a really learned Samuel Mitchell send Martin to a adjunct who specializes in Greek and Latin?” And it’s likely, Mike Mackay again points out, that the reason for that would have been likely because at the time, Charles Anthon was collecting stories about Native American people, about origin stories about any stories about Native Americans. He was planning on publishing a book with kind of an anthology of different stories, so he would likely have been interested in a book that was apparently discovered that contained a bunch of Native American stories, right? So that seems to be the connection. So he goes to Charles Anthon and there is very conflicting accounts on what happened right? Charles Anthon will later tell what happened, and Martin Harris will later tell what happened, and they don’t seem to correlate very well at all. And so we have to scratch our head a little bit, but according to Charles Anthon, he said that when Harris came and showed him his document of these characters, it looked like an alteration of Greek and Hebrew letters with crosses and flourishes and Roman letters that were inverted or placed sideways. He claimed it was decked with various strange marks and evidently copied after the Mexican calendar given by Humboldt, but copied in such a way as not to betray the source. So this is his later recollection of what happened, and he seems to be saying that this was some sort of a forgery, right, that Joseph had done based on various things to try to make it look ancient. And he seems to be so defensive later on because once the Book of Mormon is published, and Charles Anthon’s name is becoming attached to the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon with Martin Harris telling what happened, Charles Anthon wants to distance himself from the coming forth of this book, which he believes is a fraud, and so to protect his own reputation he’s going to write in 1834 to Eber D. Howe who’s writing an anti-mormon book called “Mormonism Unvailed,” an exposé piece. He’ll write about it again in 1841 and ’44 to different pastors who are inquiring about what happened. And in each time he just downplays it as, yeah, he came to me, but I told him right away, like this is a fraud, and you’re going to lose your money, man. But Martin Harris, he tells the story that we’re more familiar with, that Anthon had examined the characters and had told him that they were Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, Arabic, and he said that they were true characters. Martin Harris recalled that “he gave me a certificate, certifying to the people of Palmyra that they were true characters.” Anthon’s certificate had the potential, it seems, to legitimize Joseph’s translation and maybe would have been printed alongside the Book of Mormon, maybe even in a front piece of the Book of Mormon. We don’t know for sure what would have happened with that. But as Charles Anthon asks, how did that boy find those plates, by the way, and when Martin says that an angel led him to those plates, he asks to see that certificate back and he rips it up and says, there are no such thing as angels these days. That’s when he says the famous lines, according to Martin Harris, he says, you bring me the plates, and we’ll get them translated, at which point, Martin apparently said, well, part of it is sealed. Part of the plates are sealed. To which he then replied, well, I can’t read a sealed book. So there you go. There’s the two accounts. So Anthon’s very different telling of what happened later seems again to be a response to his name starting to be associated with this book, and he wants to preserve his own reputation. So he tells a very different story. Martin tells the story that we’re familiar with. So what we can say for sure is that whatever the exact particulars were of what happened, Martin Harris comes back from that exchange fully convinced that Joseph has an authentic ancient record, after his talking with Bradish and Mitchell and Charles Anthon, Martin’s now just eager to help. How can I help, right? And Joseph says well, could you scribe? And that’s when Martin gets engaged as being a scribe for Joseph is after his return from New York. And later on, we know Martin’s going to front a ton of money to help publish the Book of Mormon He is convinced that Joseph is telling the truth. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
He’s all in.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. 

Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s the big takeaway for me, is there’s back-and-forth on what actually happened between Martin and Charles Anthon, and I—you know, you can go one way or the other with the sources, but the one thing that’s indisputable is that Martin comes back from this trip, and he’s all in. Like, he’s convinced that this is real, and he wants to help with it, and he makes considerable sacrifices to help with it and maintains his witness of it to the end of his life.

Scott Woodward:
No question Martin Harris was sincere.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. But this emphasis on getting it translated rather than just fulfilling the Isaiah prophecy kind of fades over time, right? And a big part of it might be Joseph Smith’s 1838 history.

Scott Woodward:
Definitely.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Which is the history most church members are familiar with. It’s the one that’s in the Pearl of Great Price. And Joseph uses this incident with Anthon. He simplifies it down to Anthon, for obvious reasons, but uses it to show how Isaiah had prophesied of the coming forth the Book of Mormon.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, that’s right. That seemed to be Joseph’s only real interest in telling the story eight years after the church was organized, eight years after the Book of Mormon had been published. That’s all in the rearview mirror. So to recall the story, Joseph seems to emphasize mostly that he had sent Martin to the East and, hey, look at this interesting conversation with Charles Anthon and look how that fulfilled Isaiah. But that was not the original intention: Hey, let’s go fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah. In hindsight, wow, that’s what happened, but that was not, according to Lucy, according to Joseph Knight, Sr. and Jonathan Hadley, that was not the intention. That was one of the fruits but not the intention. Let’s look at the prophecy of Isaiah as recapitulated by Nephi in his vision in 2 Nephi 27. Joseph would have translated this much later after this fact, probably near the end of the translation in Fayette, New York. I just want to just examine these words and to look at the Lord’s motivation. If we—if we ask the question, why did he even go through that elaborate setup? Why would he send or tell Joseph to send a guy to the learned to have him read it to where they say well, we can’t read it because it’s sealed, like why go through that elaborate process? And I think this is actually super insightful.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
I’ll read them. This is 2 Nephi 27:15, 17-18. “It shall come to pass that the Lord God shall say unto him, to whom he shall deliver the book, take these words which are not sealed and deliver them to another, that he may show them unto the learned saying, read this, I pray thee, and the learned shall say, bring hither the book, and I will read them. And the man shall say, I cannot bring the book, for it is sealed, and the learned shall say, I cannot read it.”

Scott Woodward:
Now what happens next in these verses tells the Lord’s motive. Look at—do you want to read just verse 19?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Verse 19 reads, “Wherefore, it shall come to pass that the Lord God will deliver again the book and the words thereof to him that is not learned. And the man that is not learned shall say, I am not learned.”

Scott Woodward: I think this is super important. The Lord says to him that is not learned, you read the book. And he says, well, I’m not learned. So you can see here the feelings of utter inadequacy that this unlearned boy is going to have. He’s like, “Me?” Yeah, you. Keep going to verse 20. What’s the Lord going to say to this unlearned boy?

Casey Paul Griffiths:
“The learned shall not read them, for they have rejected them. I am able to do mine own work, therefore thou shalt read the words which I shall give unto thee.”

Scott Woodward:
That is so good. So here we’re seeing the motive of the Lord, right? Joseph, I want you to send some characters from these plates. Give them to a man to send to some learned men and ask them to read it. And they will say, I can’t read it. And then the Lord will say to the unlearned boy, that’s right, the learned can’t read it, so you read it. And he’ll say, I’m not learned. How am I supposed to read it? And the Lord will say, I can do my own work. So you read the words that I will give to you. This is a divine setup to underscore the point that the translation of this book was not done and could not have been done by human means alone. And he says it again in verse 21, he says, “I will show unto the children of men that I am able to do mine own work.” And then he punctuates this in verse 23 by saying, “For behold, I am God, and I am a God of miracles.” That’s the context in which he proclaims himself a God of miracles, the context of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. And so that’s the Lord’s major point here, according to 2 Nephi 27, is that the Book of Mormon is a miracle: that Joseph’s own secular efforts to translate couldn’t work, right? Trying to get his alphabet and trying to work from the alphabet to translate the record. That’s not going to work. His hope for professional help for those with actual ancient language expertise to do the lion’s share of the translation, that’s not going to work. The book had to come forth through the unlearned boy working in faith with the God of miracles. That’s the point of that whole episode, as Joseph later learns when he translates 2 Nephi 27. I think that’s awesome.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. This is a complicated story with a lot of different witnesses, different locations. It’s—it’s a huge puzzle to put together, but whenever I’m talking about the sources involved in it, I try to say, hey, don’t miss the forest for the trees. Every person, whether it’s Emma or Joseph or Martin or the Whitmer family or Oliver Cowdery has the same point they’re trying to make when they describe the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. This was a miracle. This was something—Emma Smith was asked, do you think Joseph Smith could have made this up? She said “No. For one as unlearned and ignorant as he was, it was simply impossible.” 

Scott Woodward:
Not a chance.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. And it seems like the Lord deemed it so, that it would have been great if somebody with Samuel Mitchell’s prestige or Charles Anthon’s learning or Luther Bradish’s political connections could have been the person that brought forth the Book of Mormon, but it’s supposed to be this uneducated farm boy, who really doesn’t have the background and the know-how to do so, that highlights the miraculous nature of the book, why it’s such a big deal, and why it testifies that we really do live in an age of miracles—that the day of miracles has not passed.

Scott Woodward:
And the proof of that, the Lord’s major proof, is The Book of Mormon itself. Isaiah calls it “a marvelous work and a wonder.” Marvelous means miraculous, and a wonder is a miracle. And so another translation is, “It’s a miraculous work and a miracle.” That’s what the Book of Mormon is. And so that’s the point.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Absolutely. This is such rich history. I mean, we haven’t even actually gotten to the translation of the Book of Mormon yet. We’re just setting the table here, right? 

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
But there’s so much to explore here and so many wonderful sources, and I’ll just add, so much good stuff that’s been written in the last little while. Kyle Walker’s research on the Smith family, Gerrit Dirkmaat and Mike Mackay’s book on the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, From Darkness unto Light. There’s just a lot of good stuff out there to explore, and the story’s just becoming more complex and wonderful as we go. So don’t assume you know everything. There’s probably going to be some stuff that you can find as you start to search through the sources that will wow you, even if you’ve heard this story a couple dozen times.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, so let’s land the plane here today, and then in our next episode, let’s get into all the details about the actual translation of the record.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Very good. So next time we’re going to actually dive into translation. That’s going to include some complexities about the mechanics of translation, what the scribes said about translation, what Joseph said about translation, and also some well-known stories like the lost manuscript that we’re also learning a few new things about as well.

Scott Woodward:
Awesome. Look forward to it. Thank you for listening to this episode of Church History Matters. Next week we continue this series by doing a deep dive into the actual process of translating The Book of Mormon. We’ll look at several first- and second-hand accounts, which describe this one-of-a-kind process in detail, including Joseph Smith’s curious use of seer stones as he did so. Today’s episode was produced by Zander Sturgill, edited by Nick Galieti and Scott Woodward, with show notes and transcript by Gabe Davis. Church History Matters is a podcast of Scripture Central, a nonprofit which exists to help build enduring faith in Jesus Christ by making Latter-day Saint scripture and church history accessible, comprehensible, and defensible to people everywhere. For more resources to enhance your gospel study, go to scripturecentral.org, where everything is available for free because of the generous donations of people like you. Thanks again for being a part of this with us.