Item Detail
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30612
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1
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8
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English
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The Gold Plates and Ancient Metal Epigraphy
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Dialogue : A Journal of Mormon
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Summer 2019
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52
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2
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Dialogue Foundation
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37-58
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Richard Bushman has called the gold plates story “the single most troublesome item in Joseph Smith’s history.” Smith famously claimed to have
discovered, with the help of an angel, anciently engraved gold plates buried
in a hill near his home in New York from which he translated the sacred text
of the Book of Mormon. Not only a source of new scripture comparable to the Bible, the plates were also a tangible artifact, which he allowed a small circle of believers to touch and handle before they were taken back into the custody of the angel. The story is fantastical and otherworldly and has
sparked both devotion and skepticism as well as widely varying assessments
among historians. Critical and non-believing historians have tended to
assume that the presentation of material plates shows that Smith was actively
engaged in religious deceit of one form or another, while Latter-day Saint
historians have been inclined to take Smith and the traditional narrative
at face value. For example, Bushman writes, “Since the people who knew
Joseph best treat the plates as fact, a skeptical analysis lacks evidence. A
series of surmises replaces a documented narrative.” Recently, Anne Taves
has articulated a middle way between these positions by suggesting that while Smith most likely fabricated the plates, he may nevertheless have been sincere in his belief in their spiritual authenticity and antiquity.
For now, I would like to set aside the question of Smith’s motivations and innermost understanding of himself and the gold plates and inquire into the more basic issue of the historical plausibility of the plates themselves. After all, whatever Smith may have said about the plates and however strong the evidence that his family and friends accepted their existence and authenticity, the gold plates and its narrative congeners (brass plates, plates of Nephi, plates of Ether, etc.) represents a historical datum capable of investigation and substantiation by itself. For not only are they claimed to be a product of remote antiquity, but are said to stem from writing cultures with roots in the ancient Near East and Israel-Judah in particular. Assuming historicity and that the peoples of the Book of Mormon were constrained and inflected by human culture and technology, we should expect to find circumstantial corroboration within the available historical record for this general picture of preserving lengthy sacred narrative on metal.
[from author] -
Apologetic and Critical Assumptions about Book of Mormon Historicity
History and the Claims of Revelation : Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates
Joseph Smith : Rough Stone Rolling
Lehi in the Desert; The World of the Jaredites; There Were Jaredites
No Man Knows My History : The Life of Joseph Smith, the Mormon Prophet
Reading the Gold Plates
Since Cumorah : The Book of Mormon in the Modern World
The Book of Mormon Authorship : New Light on Ancient Origins