​​Scott Woodward:
If we had video footage of the translation process of The Book of Mormon, what would we see? What would we actually watch Joseph Smith do during a translation session? Now, of course, we don’t have such video footage, but we do have perhaps the next best thing: multiple eyewitness accounts of those who saw the process up close, firsthand. And what they said they saw was a decidedly nonsecular, nonacademic, one-of-a-kind translation method involving a young, 22- and 23-year-old Joseph Smith looking at seer stones in a hat, a process many of these witnesses described as, “truly miraculous.” In today’s episode we take a closer look at what we can know from the historical record about Joseph Smith’s translation process. We’ll also briefly explore the New England subculture in Joseph’s day in which some believed that people with certain spiritual gifts could use special objects, like seer stones or divining rods, to channel to divine power to do things like find lost objects or find underground water sources. We’ll also discuss the fascinating details of what we know about how and when Joseph came upon two seer stones in addition to those that came with the plates and were bound together in silver bows, and what we know about his using these during the Book of Mormon translation. 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 with me is Casey Griffiths, also a managing director at Scripture Central, and today Casey and I dive into our third episode in this series dealing with the coming forth of The Book of Mormon. Now let’s get into it.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Hello, and welcome back to Church History Matters. I’m Casey Paul Griffiths, and with me as always is the indomitable Scott Woodward. Scott, say hi.

Scott Woodward:
Hi Casey. I think I might be domitable.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
No, I’ve always seen you as indomitable. I’m running out of words to describe you because you’re just so wonderful.

Scott Woodward:
Nice try, nice try.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
This is us continuing our series on the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. We’re exploring the miracle of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, which most early church members would cite this as the miraculous evidence that God was doing things in our time, that He was bringing forth His truth and restoring the gospel. And previous to this, we have talked a little bit about the lead-up to the Book of Mormon. We’ve talked a little bit about Joseph Smith and Moroni. And Scott, give us a recap on what our last episode was about, just so we’re caught up real quick.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, last time we talked about how Joseph and Emma go to Harmony, Pennsylvania, where he made preparations to translate. And since it appears that Joseph had not been given any instructions on specifically how to translate the plates, he came up with a plan, which was to transcribe the Egyptian alphabet, his mom says, from off the plates, basically every character that was unique, then to have Martin Harris take this alphabet to the east to recruit professional help from linguistic experts. I think you referred to them as the three wise men, Casey, if I remember right.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, three wise men of the East.

Scott Woodward: And the plan was that with their aid, or with a wise man’s—someone, some linguistic expert—Joseph could create a translation key from the Egyptian alphabet, and then he could interpret the plates in a more traditional, secular way. But Joseph had also begun to figure out that he could see some English words in his Nephite interpreters, the Urim and Thummim, the spectacles he got with the plates. So he had attempted a translation on his own, but he didn’t know if he was getting it right, because he couldn’t read what was on the plates. He didn’t know what that said. All he knew is that sometimes he saw English words in the interpreters. And so another part of the plan is that Martin would take his minimal translation and get it verified to see if these linguists in the East could verify that his translation was correct. That would give Joseph a nice confidence boost that he would need to continue on. So they executed this plan, but it had mixed results. We talked about that, that no linguist had agreed to translate Joseph’s Egyptian alphabet key, so that was a bust, but when Martin returns from Albany and New York City with confirmation from two linguists that the characters were authentic and that Joseph’s limited translations were correct, Joseph’s confidence in what he was seeing in the spectacles grew. And so shortly after, Martin comes back with his confidence bolstered, and without the aid of professional linguists, Joseph begins the translation work in earnest. It was a translation, we emphasized last time, a translation that was decidedly a supernatural translation rather than a secular one, right? And it seems like Joseph was a little hesitant about that. He wanted linguistic help from experts, but the Lord says it must be you, the unlearned boy. You read the words which I will give you. And so that’s when it began, and he began to trust what he was seeing. So how’d I do?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Very good, very good. And I’m going to pick up the story from there.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
After Martin comes back from the East, and the one thing that is not disputed about this part of the story is that Martin is convinced that Joseph is the real deal. He dives in head first and starts acting as Joseph’s scribe. So this incident with the wise men of the East occurs around February of 1828. Martin shows up in Harmony, which again is far removed from Palmyra, and they start translating. The tentative dates are April 12, 1828 to June 14, 1828. There’s a little wiggle room in there. Martin’s daughter, for instance, gets married, and we think that he would have been there for that. If he wasn’t, that might explain a large part of why there were tensions with his wife. He’s off gallivanting with Joseph Smith while his daughter’s getting married. And then comes one of the most well-known stories, which we’re only going to touch on peripherally here today. That’s the Lost Manuscript of the Book of Mormon. I’m going to summarize this really quick. It deserves its own episode. Maybe we’ll decide to do an episode on the lost manuscript. I’m just going to hit some major points here. So they decide they’re gonna have to take a break anyway in June because Emma’s about to give birth to their first child. So Martin asked Joseph for the manuscript. Joseph, according to his 1832 history, importunes the Lord three times, is told no. The third time, it’s a yes if he’ll abide by these conditions: He can only show it to five people. We’re pretty sure we know who the five people are. They include Martin’s wife, sister-in-law, her husband, and others. And then Martin takes off with the manuscript, and Joseph is left behind. Emma gives birth. I just got back from Harmony a couple days ago, and one of the saddest things you’ll see there is this little baby’s grave. We think the baby was named Alvin, but the grave, the headstone just says in memory of an infant son of Joseph and Emma Smith, and it is dated to the time when Martin is in Palmyra with the record. So that explains why Joseph was too distracted to wonder why Martin hadn’t sent a letter or a postcard. According to Lucy Mack Smith, after two weeks of Emma being very, very ill, Emma’s the one that urges Joseph to go to Palmyra and find out what happened with the manuscript. And then most people know this story: Martin’s lost the manuscript. They can’t find it. This is where section 3 of the Doctrine and Covenants comes into play because Joseph is rebuked by the angel and has the record and the interpreters removed from him. It’s not until September when he gets them again, and it does seem like Joseph has this kind of crisis of confidence after what happens with Martin, because according to the histories we have, he doesn’t do a lot of translating from the fall of 1828 into the spring of 1829. And there’s still a couple things that happen: Joseph’s dad and his brother come and visit him. That’s where section 4 of the Doctrine and Covenants is received. This time when I read section 4 with that background, I wondered if section 4 wasn’t as much for Joseph Smith as it was for his dad. It’s received on behalf of his dad. But he’s just struggling. He can’t quite manage to kind of get back in the mode of translating, and it’s not until April 1829 that he actually starts again. That’s when Oliver Cowdery shows up at his home, and then the next day they start translating, and they are off to the races. The entire Book of Mormon is completed the remainder of April, May, and June, though there’s some twists and turns along the way. So the big overview would be they start on April 7th. They spend the rest of April and most of May in Harmony, Pennsylvania at the Joseph Smith home that’s there. Then in June, because of increased persecution, they move to Fayette, New York to stay with the Whitmer family, and that’s where the last month of translation takes place. By the end of June, the entire translation is finished. Is that a good overview of translation here, Scott?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I couldn’t help but just thinking about how fast that was, right? We should spend a whole episode on this, on the speed of the translation of the Book of Mormon, don’t you think? He starts April 7th, and they’re done by the end of June. That’s crazy fast.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, that’s remarkable. And let me address one more thing that comes up really commonly when people ask about this. We’re using the phrase “the lost manuscript” instead of 116 pages because we’re not totally sure how long the lost manuscript is. In the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith refers to the lost manuscript as the Book of Lehi, says it’s an abridgment. So it’s not direct history like 1 Nephi, it’s more like the rest of the Book of Mormon where Mormon is kind of putting the pieces together for us, and he calls it 116 pages. The reason why we are just being cautious with that is we looked in the printer’s manuscript, which is the earliest full copy of the Book of Mormon, and all the material that replaces what was lost with the manuscript from First Nephi to Words of Mormon is 116 pages.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
And some scholars have said that’s too much of a coincidence to ignore.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
So what’s likely is that Joseph didn’t know how long the lost manuscript was. Martin Harris’s brother, Emer, says it may have been longer than that. So Joseph was trying to figure out what was lost. He looked at what was put in its place, and in the printer’s manuscript it was 116 pages, so he used that as his estimate, but it probably was just an estimate. It could have been longer than that. We just don’t know that much about it except that Joseph Smith says it was an abridgment of the Book of Lehi. Someday we’ll have the Lost Manuscript. And someday, Scott, we’ll do an episode that dives into its contents, but we’re trying to keep a focus on translation.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
So you lead us into the big question: What are we exploring today?

Scott Woodward:
Today’s big question is this: We mentioned that Joseph’s translation of the Book of Mormon was decidedly supernatural rather than secular. So what does that mean, right? What did Joseph’s supernatural translation method consist of? Like, what exactly does he do? If we had a video recording of the process, what would we see? As we come to understand what he was doing when he was translating, how should that inform how we view the Book of Mormon itself? Of course, we don’t have any video recordings of the translation process, but we do have the next best thing, right? Which is eyewitness accounts. We have eyewitness accounts. So we have several people who either saw the process or who were intimately acquainted with the details from those who had seen it, who wrote down what they saw or heard. And so we want to get into that today. We want to look at the details from eyewitnesses as to what they said they saw. And this should be fun.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. So I’m going to bring up a couple of words that might be more complex than some church members assume, like Urim and Thummim, Nephite interpreters, seer stones. Give us a feel for what the equipment is. What kind of equipment did Joseph Smith use in the translation?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, so here’s our profile of the translator. We have in 1828, 22-year-old farm boy with no translation experience, and his equipment, his resources are these—he calls them the Urim and Thummim. He starts calling them that about 1832. Before that, he just called them the Nephite interpreters or the spectacles sometimes. Joseph describes them as two stones in silver bows which were deposited with the plates that God had prepared for the purpose of translating the book. And the possession and use of these stones, these connected stones, Moroni said, constituted seers in ancient times. So Joseph has these two stones that constituted seers—we can call them seer stones—that were connected together, but he didn’t ever refer to them as the seer stones. He referred to them as the Urim and Thummim or these interpreters—Nephite interpreters. But he did have other resources. He had two, we think at least two, other seer stones that he had found prior to receiving the plates from Moroni and the Urim and Thummim. He had two stones that were, one was described as kind of being brown, kind of a chocolatey brown-looking color with lines going through it. Another one was described as being mostly white—

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
White or clear. Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—or clear, yeah, translucent, I imagine. And so, yeah, do you want to say anything about those two?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Let me mention offhand, sometimes people are shocked to find out that that second seer stone, the brown, chocolate-colored one is still in possession of the church. In 2015 there were photographs published of the brown seer stone. And this seer stone is one of several seer stones that the church possesses, and I should use air quotes with “seer stones,” but it’s the only one that has a clear provenance that can be traced back to Joseph Smith. So this seer stone apparently was given to Oliver by Joseph once the translation process was done. Oliver gave it to his wife, Elizabeth, who’s a member of the Whitmer family, and when Oliver dies, Elizabeth gave it to Phineas Young, who gave it to Brigham Young, and that’s how it stays in our possession. And again, it fits the description that some people, especially Emma Smith, gave of a seer stone that was associated with translation. So that’s kind of neat to think that one of the instruments of translation is still in our possession.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
At least we think it is, it’s there. And I always have students say, you know, if we fired this thing up to see what it can do—obviously not. I don’t know if it was used as an instrument after the translation process was over. I found one reference to Wilford Woodruff putting it on the altar of the Manti Temple when the Manti Temple was dedicated, and that was its last official use. Ever since then, it’s been just kept in the first presidency’s hands. Now I believe the church history department has it. But you can find photographs of this fairly easily online.

Scott Woodward:
Just Google it.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, so at least one of these instruments is still in our possession, is a good thing to know.

Scott Woodward:
And you totally need to explain a little bit because you just said that the church has a bunch of seer stones. What? What? So are there different people that have, like, claimed seer stones, and so the church collects them or what?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah. So there’s this mysterious thing called the First Presidency Vault. And I have a friend whose grandfather was the executive secretary of the First Presidency. He gave me a list. This list is well-known, it’s not hard to find, of things that are in the First Presidency’s vault. And among them were several seer stones, and I’m guessing most of these seer stones don’t have a clear provenance. The most likely explanation is that some family brought them to the first presidency and said “Hey, this is a seer stone. It’s legit,” and the First Presidency kind of said, “Okay. Well, we’ll set it aside,” because they’ve only given attention to the brown seer stone, and that’s because with any object you have to test its provenance. If someone comes up to you and says, “Hey, I’ve got George Washington’s hat.” I wouldn’t pay a lot of money for that without saying, “Can you prove to me that it’s his hat?” With this seer stone, the provenance is fairly brief. It’s just Joseph to Oliver to Elizabeth to Phineas to Brigham, which is incredibly brief. And it’s been in church possession more or less since the 1850s. The other ones don’t have any kind of clear sense of provenance. And so they’re there, and that’s interesting, but I wouldn’t associate any historical events with these other seer stones, if that makes sense.

Scott Woodward:
Interesting. Super interesting. Okay. Very cool. Now, to some listeners, I think most modern ears, this idea of seer stones, rocks, essentially that can channel divine power—

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
—to aid in translation, or I know it was pretty common in Joseph’s day to be used to find lost objects. That sounds extremely wild. It sounds unlikely. It sounds kind of folk-magicky, right? Could we just talk about that, kind of this New England subculture for a little while, just regarding seer stones and objects of divine power? I mean, how does that come to America? Why does Joseph not have a problem with this? It seems like people in his community also had seer stones, right? And there are girls—Sally Chase down the street that’s got a seer stone. I think hers was green, if I remember right. I mean, you read church history, and you start to—this seems, like, kind of normal to some people in that culture. I know other people were very much put off by this and were already quite suspicious, but there seems to be a subculture in New England where such things as seer stones was something that went side-by-side with Christianity.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It wasn’t cultish, it wasn’t—right? I mean—

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
That’s one mental leap that we’ve got to make to get into the time period here, is—this does seem strange to us, right?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we generally would associate some of this stuff with occult practices.

Scott Woodward:
Totally.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
In the world Joseph Smith lived in, it doesn’t seem like it was associated with occult practices. Mike Mackay and Nick Frederick have written a great book called Joseph Smith’s Seer Stones where they just went back and looked at, you know, Palmyra newspapers, other documents, and found that there were multiple people that possessed seer stones. For instance, the Wayne Sentinel, that is the newspaper in Palmyra, in 1825, so this is after Moroni’s appeared to Joseph Smith, but before Joseph gets the plates, that’s in 1827, has an article where they said buried treasure had been found, quote, “by the help of a mineral stone, which becomes transparent when placed in a hat and the light excluded by the face of him who looks into it.” Now that sounds really familiar, doesn’t it? And it’s being reported here in a local newspaper as kind of a, hey, this thing happened. So it was considered to be special, but not considered to be like a cult at the time. Christianity and folk magic kind of went hand in hand and weren’t seen as diametrically opposed during this time. In fact, a lot of the notoriety Joseph Smith receives as a young man before he has the plates is because he’s seen as someone that can use a seer stone and has specific gifts associated with it. I mean, that’s one thing that you’ve got to kind of center yourself in the culture to say “This does seem strange to us, but it doesn’t seem like it was that strange or unknown to Joseph Smith or his contemporaries.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. Steven Harper, he’s written a bit on this, and he noted that the age of enlightenment was well underway in Joseph’s day. The age of enchantment, where people thought in terms of maybe this more animated worldview that objects could hold power—that was on its way out, but not totally out, that Joseph was in the shadow of the enlightenment, but that it had not fully dawned, at least not on everybody. There were plenty of people in Joseph’s day that would have looked upon this as very odd, the way that many modern people do, but there’s this subculture of people. And this originated, what, in the 1600s, at least? It comes from England about the 1600s to the 1800s. It kind of starts dying out in the 1800s. There’s these people in the communities that were called scryers or seers, that used stones to find these hidden or lost objects. Many of our listeners might know about water witching, using divining rods or something to find water, wells in the ground. Like, that’s kind of a remnant, kind of a leftover piece of that more broad worldview. One time, in Joseph’s first, I think it was his first court hearing, that Josiah Stowell’s sons, or one son—I can’t remember if it was one or two sons—had charged him with with frauding their father because Josiah Stowell had hired Joseph to help him find buried treasure, right? The famous silver mine story. And Joseph had talked him down and told him that he should probably quit that because there’s not any treasure to be found. But they take Joseph to court, and we have this one account where a guy named William Purple, he’s the court stenographer guy, is the person that writes down what people are saying. He tells a story that Josiah Stowell takes the stand and is asked if Joseph defrauded him, and he says “No.” He says, I know there are such thing as, like, people that claim to have the gift, but I know Joseph. I don’t believe he can do it. I know he can do it. I’ve seen him do it, and he shared some examples of Joseph looking in his seer stone and then seeing stuff. And so then Joseph Smith Jr. is called to the stand, and the court asks if they can see the stone. Joseph has it on his person. He pulls it out, and he holds it up for the court to see. And then they asked, how did you get this stone? And this is super interesting. He said that there was a girl in his town of Palmyra, Sally Chase, who had a green-colored stone, that she could see things, and he asked—Joseph asked Sally if he could look into her stone, and she let him, and when he looked in her stone he saw another stone a small stone far off, over by Lake Erie about 150 miles away, anyway tells a story about how he asked her over time, and every time he looked into her stone he saw that stone, and so finally he got permission from his parents to go to Lake Erie—south side of Lake Erie. He knew right where it was. He dug down under this certain root, and he pulled out the seer stone, washed it off, placed it in his hat, and he discovered, according to the court stenographer he said that what Joseph said is he discovered that time and place and distance were annihilated, the intervening obstacles were removed, and that he possessed one of the attributes of deity, which was an all-seeing eye. I mean, this is all in, like, in court, like, Joseph saying this is where it came from. This is where I found it. This is how it works for me. It’s a remarkable piece of history. William Purple is not—he’s not a believer, but he’s just jotting all this down like, holy cow. So this is the story of one of those seer stones. And then he found another one at Willard Chase’s well. Is that correct?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, we believe this is the brown seer stone that we’ve talked about so much. And he finds it digging a well on the Willard Chase farm. That’s the story that’s told.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
And apparently, this is the one that, like we said, comes down to us. Now, let me mention one aside here, too. I mentioned I was in Harmony recently. If you drive up from Harmony about 20 miles, there’s a town called Nineveh, and that’s where Josiah Stowell’s house is still there. Josiah Stowell’s house is nice compared to other houses from the period. Josiah Stowell approached Joseph Smith in all versions of the story. Joseph Smith isn’t out soliciting work with his seer stones. Josiah Stowell approaches Joseph Smith and does it at a time when the family’s in financial distress because they were building this house, and then Alvin died, and it feels like they’re going to lose their house, so all the outside sources hold up Joseph’s story, and his mother tells the same story, too, that Joseph doesn’t seek out this work, Josiah Stowell hears about him and approaches him. And the interesting thing is Joseph does not find the silver mine. He prevails on Josiah Stowell to back off. That’s why they wind up in court, because some people are saying, “Well, Joseph defrauded this guy.” Josiah Stowell is 100% convinced, even though they don’t find the silver mine, that Joseph is the real deal.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
In fact, I was surprised when I was there to hear that Josiah Stowell stayed with Joseph. In some accounts, he’s the first person Joseph hands the plates to when he comes back to the hill, hands him through the window to Josiah Stowell. So while Joseph doesn’t solicit this work, he emphasizes that in his history, the family’s in dire financial straits. This isn’t his job, but it does seem like word gets around that he has gifts and gets around far enough down to Harmony, which is still a two and a half hour drive away today. So that court case is an interesting thing, introducing the seer stones here.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah. I just like the idea that—Mark Ashurst-McGee, he did his master’s thesis on Joseph’s seer stones. I like his progression: He says that it seems that Joseph began as, like, a little, local village seer, who just had this gift to be able to see the unseen using this object, a seer stone. And then God chose him to be his Seer, capital S, and helped him develop his spiritual gifts to put them to a lot better use, for instance, translating the Book of Mormon. That’s going to be much more significant than finding some lost object. So this transition from village seer to the Lord’s prophet, seer, and revelator, it seems like that’s the path. He already had this gift even before he was officially called to be the prophet. And so we see what God did with the boy with those gifts. So yeah, you’re right, the modern listener or reader, researcher, you kind of have to just get into their worldview to understand what we’re about to talk about. The eyewitness accounts of the translation of the Book of Mormon, this is not a secular translation. This is supernatural, and we have multiple witnesses, primary and secondary, that all point to this same story, there’s a little differing details that will point out, but they’re all the same essential story. So—

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right. Well, and I would say too, there’s multiple witnesses, a ton of witnesses, that this is a miracle. And some of those witnesses have slightly different details. Some people talk about Nephite interpreters, some people talk about the seer stone. They are all united in saying this was a miraculous process. This wasn’t a normal—it was a miracle in their sight. Let’s dive into the sources. Who do we want to talk to first when we’re trying to learn about translation of the Book of Mormon?

Scott Woodward:
Well, we want to go to firsthand accounts, right? We want to go to—probably our number one witness, of course, is Joseph Smith. Frustratingly, he said the least about the details, but we do have a little bit from him. Next would be his scribes. Oliver Cowdery is going to be the scribe that will be with Joseph for the length—the duration of most of the Book of Mormon as we have it today. Of course, Martin Harris did 116 pages. We know Emma helped out with that a little bit. So Emma would be one. We have one from Joseph Knight, Sr. who was not a scribe, but he was super familiar with the family. He was super close with Joseph. He had hired Joseph. He’d given Joseph his sleigh to go date Emma. Joseph shared details with him, as far as we know. We don’t know exactly how he came to the knowledge, but he has some really good stuff to say. So does the Whitmer family. When Joseph goes to Fayette, the Whitmer family is going to witness this process as it finishes out. So we’re gonna get David Whitmer. He’s gonna say a lot, especially later on in his life, he’ll say a lot. And then also one of my favorite accounts is actually Oliver Cowdery’s future wife. What’s her name? Elizabeth?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Elizabeth Whitmer, yeah. She talks about it, too, yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, she was 14 years old when it was happening in her home, and she said that she often sat by and saw and heard them translate. She said, “I sat by often and saw and heard them translate and write for hours together.” So it’d be fun to hear what she has to say. And so, yeah, I think that’s a nice little cloud of witnesses right there. So I don’t know, where should we start? Start with Joseph? Joseph and Oliver?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Well, the two people we most want to talk to are Joseph and Oliver, right? They’re there for almost the entire translation process. You got Emma and Martin helping out during the Lost Manuscript phase, but for the most part the main event is Joseph and Oliver. So let’s see what they have to say first.

Scott Woodward:
All right. Let’s do—how about 1829, our earliest account? Joseph said, “I would inform you that I translated by the gift and power of God and caused to be written”—And he talks about the Book of Lehi. This is actually in the early preface of the Book of Mormon talking about how it was lost—“I translated by the gift and power of God.” He’ll use that phrase predominantly. 1832, “The Lord had prepared spectacles for to read the book, therefore I commenced translating the characters.” 1833, “Translated into our own language by the gift and power of God.” 1835, “The angel told me the Urim and Thummim was hid up with the record and that God would give me power to translate it with the assistance of this instrument.” Joseph always highlights the instrument, the spectacles, the Urim and Thummim. He always emphasizes that. He says, “I obtained them and I translated them into the English language by the gift and power of God.” That’s an interview on the 9th of November, 1835. Consistent, right? 1838 history. “I obtained them and the Urim and Thummim with them by the means of which I translated the plates.” So it’s always the Urim and Thummim, and he’s specific in saying that that’s the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates. And that’s Joseph. Do you wanna do Oliver?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, Oliver seems to favor the Nephite interpreters as well. 1834, he writes a series of letters in the Messenger and Advocate. He says, I continued uninterrupted to write from his mouth as he translated with the Urim and Thummim or, as the Nephites would have said, interpreters. So it feels like Joseph and Oliver favor the phrase “Urim and Thummim,” which to them they often clarify to say Nephite interpreters. In fact, here’s kind of an offhand one, too. Reuben Miller is a guy who’s there when Oliver comes back to the church. So Oliver leaves the church, he’s excommunicated in 1838, comes back in 1848. Reuben Miller is a guy who’s there when Oliver comes back. And Oliver apparently bore his testimony, Reuben Miller writes it, so this is secondhand, but pretty close, and he says that Oliver said he translated it by the gift and power of God by the means of the Urim and Thummim or, as it is called by that book, holy interpreters. So Joseph and Oliver tend to refer to the Nephite interpreters and they use the term Urim and Thummim, which some people have broadened the meaning of Urim and Thummim, but it seems like Joseph and Oliver consistently are referring to the Nephite interpreters in their reminiscences. Is that fair to say, Scott?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I’ve noticed a trend that I can’t totally pin down, I can’t fully get on board with. Maybe some listeners can help me and send me some material, but I’ve searched like crazy, but—there’s a line, I don’t mean to be critical at all. This is just me wrestling. In the Gospel Topics essay on the Book of Mormon Translation, there’s this line that says, “In the course of time, Joseph Smith and his associates often use the term Urim and Thummim to refer to the single stone as well as the interpreters that came with the plates.” I can’t find a single instance where Joseph Smith referred to the single seer stone as the Urim and Thummim. In fact, when he talks about translating the Book of Mormon, when he says Urim and Thummim, he often will say phrases like, “that came with the plates” or “that was found with the record,” right? There’s one more I didn’t read, for instance: Here’s the 1842 account. He said, “With the records was found a curious instrument, which the ancients called Urim and Thummim, which consisted of two transparent stones set in a rim of a bow fastened to a breastplate.” And then he says, “Through the medium of the Urim and Thummim, I translated the record by the gift and power of God.” I can’t find Joseph ever calling the seer stone the Urim and Thummim. So that’s—there is some ambiguity. Sometimes people will say, “Well, he just uses that term interchangeably, so you never know if he’s talking about the single stone or the Nephite interpreters that came with the plates.” And so I say, “Well, I don’t know about that. I see both Joseph and Oliver consistently, they stay steady on the Nephite interpreters that came with the record. It was by that means that the record was translated.”

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
In fact, we don’t get any accounts that Joseph used the single seer stone until 1870 with Emma Smith. So maybe we’ll come to those in just a second. But, uh—

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
In fact, let me address those right now.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
So if Joseph and Oliver are referring to the interpreters, why bring up the seer stone would be one question. The reason is is that there’s three people that consistently refer to the seer stone as the instrument that he uses, and those are Emma and Martin Harris and David Whitmer. David Whitmer is probably the one that mentions it the most or the most emphatically. But we’re not saying that he didn’t use the seer stone. I wanna be clear with that. What we’re saying is that we ought to be cautious with these sources because they come late, and they also come from people who—I mean, Martin and Emma are directly involved in translation. David is there, and he’s one of the witnesses. None of these people are saying that Joseph Smith was lying. They’re all saying it’s miraculous.

Scott Woodward:
Right.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
But I think a lot of church members are shocked or uncomfortable with mentions of the seer stone because we just sort of built our story around Joseph and Oliver because Martin and Emma and David all disaffiliate, basically.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, they were—they were out of the church.

Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, Martin comes back, but real late. David never does. I think when we were creating our mental image of translation, we relied on Joseph and Oliver, which was correct, but we got to the point too, to where we were comfortable enough saying, “Hey, Emma and Martin and David weren’t saying that the book isn’t true, they were just giving an alternate image to what we have.” And so, I’ll go to bat for the use of the term Urim and Thummim in a broader sense, even though it seems like, you pointed out, Joseph usually says Urim and Thummim and then says specifically meaning, the Nephite interpreters but I’m open to him using the seer stone. I mean—

Scott Woodward:
Oh, yeah, yeah, I think that’s totally within the realm of possibility. And Emma and Martin are good witnesses, right? They were there. And so you don’t throw those out. Yeah, we’re not making an argument that there was no use of the seer stone. I just—I haven’t found solid sources where Joseph is calling the seer stone, singular seer stone, the Urim and Thummim, using that as a kind of a broad term. I know there’s an account in 1841, Wilford Woodruff seems to do that, and you can say that some of Joseph’s associates may have done that, but I don’t see Joseph using the term ambiguously. When he says, Urim and Thummim, I see Joseph specifically talking about the Nephite interpreters. That’s all I’m saying.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and you’re 100% correct that that’s the term Joseph used. And as Joseph is the main participant, we ought to go to him first and then use these others to kind of fill in the blanks when—we’re not dishonoring Emma or Martin or David.

Scott Woodward:
No, no.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
We’re just basically saying this is what Joseph said. Let’s square what they said with what he said first, then the other way around. Because it has become really popular in the last couple of years to just talk about the seer stone. And the seer stone is important, but if we’re going to Joseph Smith’s history and official sources, the Nephite interpreters are important as well.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, or, like any sources where Joseph Smith is the one talking, right? Secondhand or firsthand, yeah, official or unofficial. In fact, can I share my favorite secondhand source from Joseph Smith?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
It’s the earliest. It’s actually the very earliest account that we have. This is by Jonathan Hadley. This is 1829. So the Book of Mormon had just been translated, not yet printed. In fact, Jonathan Hadley was a printer in Palmyra who Joseph Smith had approached about potentially printing the Book of Mormon, and Jonathan Hadley will turn him down, but then he’s going to turn around in his newspaper, called the Palmyra Freeman, and he’s going to publish what conversation he had with Joseph. This was actually our earliest secondhand account of what Joseph Smith told him about the translation process. So this is pretty cool. Here’s what he said, quoting Jonathan Hadley, “By placing the spectacles in a hat and looking into it, Smith could, he said so at least, interpret these characters.” So according to Jonathan Hadley, Joseph told him that he would put these spectacles, or the Nephite interpreters, into the bottom of a hat, look in there, and then he could interpret the characters from off the plates. That’s our earliest also mention of the hat. Sometimes the hat throws off—Some of my students will say, wait, why is he using a hat? And, that’s consistent, right? All of the witnesses talk about Joseph putting them into a hat, if they mention anything more than just by the Urim and Thummim, they will always mention the hat. He’s just blocking out the light in order to be able to see. So anyway, I love that. That’s super early, 1829, August, Jonathan Hadley. Fantastic. And then I got to share one more: Let’s do the Elizabeth Ann Whitmer. I love hers as well, because she says, “I often sat by and saw and heard them translate.” 14-year-old girl, Whitmer daughter. She said, “Joseph never had a curtain drawn between him and his scribe while he was translating. He would place the director,” she calls it the director, “in his hat and then place his face in his hat so as to exclude the light, and then read the words as they appeared before him.” That’s a fantastic one, right? That’s—That’s her firsthand experience watching it happen, is he—he’d place the director in the hat, and then he would read the words.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
And we should point out Elizabeth is Mrs. Oliver Cowdery, too. So—

Scott Woodward:
Yes, in the future.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
—she would have plenty of opportunities to ask clarifying questions to her husband, and I think that makes her a fairly reliable witness who’s close to Oliver, who’s our second most important voice on translation. I’ll add one more thing: It’s possible that the term Urim and Thummim, which is in the Old Testament, it shows up several times in the Old Testament, mostly in regards to Moses and the breastplate of judgment, the clothing worn by the high priest. I feel comfortable with the idea that Joseph may have picked up on that later as a term that was biblical, because he’s trying to bridge the gap between people that don’t have the same background as him, that don’t have this kind of folk-magic background, and people that have a biblical worldview. And we don’t know a ton about the Urim and Thummim in the Bible, I should be clear, but it’s a term that would have been familiar. Everybody in Joseph Smith’s day is really familiar with the Bible, and so I think he adapted the term basically to try and explain what had happened, that it was a divine means of interpretation, if that makes sense.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, that embeds his experience with the biblical experience. And it doesn’t sound as biblical to say that he’s using a seer stone, or using—he’s scrying, or he’s looking in a glass. None of those terms from his culture would quite hit the ear the same as “through the Urim and Thummim, which was provided with the plates, I was enabled by the gift and power of God to translate.” It brings a level of respectability and familiarity. I think that’s accurate.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Now, another issue at stake here, too, that comes off with the accounts is what kind of translation is this?

Scott Woodward:
Oh, yeah.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Sometimes we give the impression that it’s sort of like God was giving Joseph the ideas, but Joseph is furnishing the words.

Scott Woodward:
Yes.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Using these eyewitness accounts, too, allows us to discuss was this a tight translation or a loose translation? One of the reasons the people that talk about the seer stone are valuable as well is because they seem to feel like it was a very tight translation. For instance, David Whitmer talks about Joseph Smith putting his face into the hat. He would exclude the light, a spiritual light would shine. Then here’s what he says, “A piece of something resembling parchment would appear. On that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English. Brother Joseph would read off the English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear. Thus, the Book of Mormon was translated by the gift and power of God, not by any power of man.” Now, statements like that seem to favor a really tight translation, that Joseph Smith was given precise wording. And that is a big deal when you consider how powerful some Book of Mormon passages are. Like I’ve wondered, the word “infinite,” when we talk about an “infinite atonement,” it seems like, according to David Whitmer, and most witnesses of translation, it was the precise wording that was given to Joseph Smith. He was told the precise words to use.

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, I have, some colleagues who prefer the term, “tight dictation.”

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
Because, you know, there’s all the King James language. Are we to believe that the plates the Nephite writers wrote in like a King-James-y kind of a way? Probably not, right? But again, Joseph wasn’t familiar with their language. He didn’t know their language. But what he could do was read the English words that he was seeing, and so there was someone translating, and it wasn’t Joseph in that sense, right?

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Right.

Scott Woodward:
The Lord, in 2 Nephi 27, the Lord says that the “unlearned boy should read the words, read the words, which I shall give thee.” So the Lord puts himself as the translator of the text. In fact, that David Whitmer account is corroborated really nicely with the Joseph Knight, Sr. account, which is a lot earlier, the 1840s, when he says, let me read this one, he said, “Now the way that he, Joseph Smith, translated was, he put the Urim and Thummim into his hat, and he darkened his eyes, and then he would take a sentence, and it would appear.” There it is, right? “It would appear, he says, in bright Roman letters.” I don’t know if he’s talking about a font or what he’s talking about there. “Then he would tell the writer, and he would write it. Then that would go away. And then the next sentence would come, and so on. But if it wasn’t spelled right, it would not go away ’till it was right. And so we see it was marvelous.” Marvelous means miraculous, right? Marvelous. “And thus was the whole translated.” That seems to be particularly true about names. Coriantumr. Emma even mentions that Joseph didn’t know how to spell Sarah. He had to spell some of these out. So when he comes to Sarah’s name, he’s like “S-A-R-A-H.” So sometimes he would spell, and if the names weren’t spelled right then it would not go away. So anyway, fascinating. So Joseph Knight is corroborating David Whitmer.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah.

Scott Woodward:
That’s all we’ve got. We’ve got some witnesses, and we’re trying to come up with a very complex was a complex question: tight or loose translation, dictation, what is this? And those are our sources we have to go with. And it sounds very tight.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Now, let’s add one thing into the mix for the loose translation.

Scott Woodward:
Okay.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Joseph does go back and make corrections in the Book of Mormon. He produces an updated version, and that’s why some people would say maybe it was more of a loose translation. Now, most of the changes that he makes are just to clarify. For instance, the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon calls the—converted Lamanites were a white and delightsome people, which could have racial connotations. Joseph changed that to a “pure and delightsome people.” Some of these changes didn’t make it into our scriptures until the 1981 edition of the Book of Mormon. But that’s one argument in favor of a looser translation, is that Joseph did go back and make minor changes to the record, even if the record itself for the most part doesn’t change, that he may have had the right to go back and say, “Hey, this word may have been better than this word,” even if he was given a pretty precise account of the wording that was supposed to be used.

Scott Woodward:
And there’s that 1 Nephi 11 where Nephi sees Mary, and in the 1830 he says, “Behold, the mother of God.” And 1837 Joseph goes back and changes that or adds “mother of the son of God.” There’s a few, yeah, clarifying phrases. Maybe we could say that’s an argument for a very tight translation or dictation and then loose editing later. He seems to be—I mean, if the text said, “white and delightsome,” then that’s what he said, and that’s what his scribe wrote down, but given the culture and the way that hits the ear to the modern reader in 1837, going back and changing that to “pure”—you know what I mean? You—that could be an argument for—he was just reading what he was seeing in English, but he did have some license as a prophet to go and do some loose editing to the tight translation.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah. Acting in his prophetic role, because this is a person who doesn’t see any problem with doing loose editing on the Bible, you know, that sitting down and acting under dictation of the spirit to find passages in the Bible that are problematic and saying, “You know, the spirit’s directing me to alter this or change it a little bit.” So again, everybody’s saying the translation is divine and inspired, but those are some of the nuances when it comes down to it. Can I share something really fast?

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, please.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
A couple of years ago, I was in Independence at the Community of Christ Temple there. And I was with Tonalyn Ford, who’s a great scholar that I work with at BYU, and this was a time when their archive was really open. She asked them, “Could I see the interview?” And they brought out these pieces of looseleaf paper. And I was just curious, and I walked over and said, “What are you looking at?” And these were interview notes with Emma Smith. It was the last interview that Emma did, February 4th through 10th, 1879, with her son Joseph III. And there right on the page were Joseph III’s notes written in pencil. He had written out questions in ink on the first page and then—as soon as I realized what this was, I turned to the archivist that was there and said, “Is it okay if I take pictures?” And she said, “Yeah, absolutely, go ahead.” I took the pictures. And this is all transcribed and published in the Saints Herald, which is the RLDS paper, but he starts out with some really simple questions. One of them was, “Who were the scribes when Joseph would translate the Book of Mormon?” Emma says, “Myself, Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and Reuben Hale,” are the answers she gives. She’s not there for the Fayette portion, so she doesn’t mention any Whitmers. And then on the last page, and this is a quote that’s been shared by her a lot, but it was interesting just to see it written in Joseph the Third’s handwriting. He just asks her flat out, like, “Do you think he could have deceived you?” She says, “My belief is that the Book of Mormon is of divine authenticity. I have not the slightest doubt of it. I am satisfied that no man could have dictated the writing of the manuscripts unless he was inspired, for when acting as a scribe, your father would dictate to me hour after hour, and when returning after meals or after interruptions, he could at once begin where he left off without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. This was a usual thing for him to do. It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this. For one so ignorant and unlearned as he was it was simply impossible.” Now, that’s her testimony, and let me just point out a couple things. If she’s saying Joseph could dictate and then leave and then come back and pick up where he left off, that’s really remarkable, first of all. Secondly, the text of the Book of Mormon has several places where it quotes itself. So you’ve got someone in Helaman that’s quoting someone from the Book of Alma or someone in the Book of Alma that’s quoting King Benjamin. If what Emma is saying is correct, that’s really remarkable. We’re talking a photographic memory after having dictated thousands and thousands of words. So in the midst of all this complexity, everybody is saying “This was divinely inspired.” And don’t miss the forest for the trees, is what I’m saying here. Don’t lose the overall message they were trying to share, which was, “We can’t explain this through natural means. It was supernatural.”

Scott Woodward:
Yeah, those who were closest to the translation believed it the most and bore witness that it was a miracle. And that means something, historically speaking.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Yeah, and like I said, we shouldn’t let that overwhelm these complexities that we run into, which are normal in historical accounts, that every single person to the end of their life bore witness that this was something that they couldn’t explain through natural means, that it was miraculous.

Scott Woodward:
Man. That’s good Casey Griffiths, that’s really good. Well, let me just say my last piece and then we can wrap this all up.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
Okay.

Scott Woodward:
I just want to say that to all of our listeners here, if you’re like most people who live in this age of enlightenment, then the idea that a 23-year-old Joseph Smith translated an ancient record by looking at rocks in the bottom of his hat can feel uneasy, and it can strain the belief gene, you know? And so to those in that camp I say I understand you. I’ll say that what helped me believe that such a thing was possible is the actual text of the Book of Mormon itself. As I’ve read the Book of Mormon carefully, examined its complexity, its beauty, its compelling witness of Christ, and then studying the eyewitness accounts we’ve been talking about, repeatedly and consistently that he had no manuscripts, he had nothing, he was looking at rocks in the bottom of his hat while he was doing this translation—he would read and we would write, and that’s it. Like, that’s how it worked. When I think about that, I think, well, if that kind of a book with that beauty and complexity and compelling witness, came through a 23-year-old seer looking at seer stones in his hat, then I guess I’m a believer in seer stones. Right? I’m as much a child of the enlightenment as any listener here. I’ve never seen anything close to anyone work with seer stones, but I’ve read the Book of Mormon, and for me the proof is in the end product, right? That product sings. So the evidence, when carefully examined for me, is highly, highly suspicious of a miracle. I believe that’s the best way to explain it, is that this was a miracle.

​​Casey Paul Griffiths:
I agree. And you’re absolutely right that the text of the Book of Mormon is the best evidence that we have, but it’s also nice to have all these witnesses, too, that generally interlock and agree with each other that something special was happening here during those months when the Book of Mormon was translated. And it is just months that it happens. It’s not a long period of time that causes the entire work to come forward. And I think that’s what we’re going to talk about next time.

Scott Woodward:
Let’s do 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 details of both the miraculous speed of The Book of Mormon’s translation and the impressive literary complexities within the book itself, and why that combination of both speed and complexity matters a great deal. We’ll also examine the strengths and weaknesses of various alternative explanations for the book’s origins, put forth at various times by those who don’t accept its miraculous origin story. Today’s episode was produced by Zander Sturgill, edited by Scott Woodward and Nick Galieti, 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. Thank you so much for being a part of this with us.