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Writer's pictureRichard Lyman Bushman

Translation

A supplementary podcast to this letter can be read here.

To Truth Seekers,

There is good reason for the CES authors to review translation in their critique of Joseph Smith and Latter-day Saint culture. For the past quarter century or so, Church members have had to deal with a startling new understanding of how the Book of Mormon was translated. People of my generation grew up thinking Joseph Smith looked through the Urim and Thummim, saw an English translation of the Nephite text, and dictated the words to a scribe who wrote them down. More recently historians, to the surprise and shock of many, have drawn attention to historical sources that describe Joseph Smith looking through a seerstone that he put in a hat to keep out the light. He dictated the words which he saw in the stone while the records lay covered on the table. It is not hard to see why some are puzzled by all this.


For a while as stories of the seerstone began to circulate, critics complained that Church leaders were concealing the seerstone version of translation while perpetuating the old story of the Urim and Thummim. The critics were outraged at this blatant deception when evidence of the seerstone was right there in the records. Later when the Church acknowledged the truth of the seerstone and the covered plates, the objection changed. The critics expressed their puzzlement as to the purpose of the plates. Why all the trouble to record the history, preserve the plates, and dig them up if they were covered by a cloth during translation while the prophet stared into the stone.


The CES author of the translation entry also described the seerstone as faintly absurd. “Joseph used the same magic device or ‘Ouija Board’ that he used during his treasure hunting days. He put a rock – called a ‘peep stone’ – in his hat and put his face in the hat to tell his customers the location of buried treasure on their property.” The whole scene is made to appear ludicrous.


The CES author goes on to complain about his treatment after the Church opened up about the seerstone. After “learning this disturbing new information and feeling betrayed, I have been attacked and gaslighted by revisionist Mormon apologist that it’s my fault and the fault of anyone else for not knowing this.” It is true, as the apologists say, that translation by way of a seerstone was described by B. H. Roberts at the beginning of the nineteenth century—the seerstone story was in print for any who would dig it up--but it is also true that few Latter-day Saints were aware of it. The author could have grown up the Church and never heard of the seerstone. The Urim and Thummim version of translation prevailed everywhere, including among Church leaders. That means the author was not at fault for not knowing about the “rock,” as he calls it, but on the other hand neither were Church leaders remiss for not disclosing the information. In denying the peepstone version of translation, they were conveying what they themselves believed. Nearly everyone had to make the transition to the seerstone, including the authorities.


So where do we stand on the question of translation right now (2024)? The seerstone story prevails among LDS historians, General Authorities, and increasingly the rank and file membership. The strange combination of the magical and the spiritual in translating with a stone is gradually being absorbed. Church members read about it in the Joseph Smith Papers and the Church-published history, Saints. There is a picture of the seerstone in the Church History Museum.


But this apparent concensus is not entirely stable. The CES author cites a letter from two BYU religion professors objecting to the David Whitmer account of the seerstone. The letter was written in 2000 when the seerstone was still in contention, and they soon were to be swamped by Church historians acknowledging use of the stone. More recently, however, objections to the stone account have been raised in a serious book by two well informed Latter-day Saint writers, a historian and a lawyer. They have written a lengthy treatise against what they call STITH, the Stone in the Hat theory. They find flaws in David Whitmer’s story of the stone and all the other less definitive accounts of translation by this method. The authors point out that by

an overwhelming majority, the sources on the subject speak of translation by way of the Urim and Thummim, not through a seerstone--to which the others reply that the seerstone also was sometime referred to as a Urim and Thummim. This is not a struggle between believing historians and critics but among believers differing among themselves. It is debate over how to evaluate the sources, not how to defend a faithful position against attack.


Right now it seems that Church members will have to stand to the side while new sources are brought to light and the conversation proceeds. Meanwhile, we are left with perplexing questions. What was the purpose of the plates if they lay covered on the table while the translation proceeded? Was the long-lasting and demanding effort to create and preserve them without purpose? I don’t see this as an issue that undermines testimony, but we are trying to clear up a somewhat confusing picture of translation.


I doubt that the plates will ever come to be basically irrelevant to translation. The fact is that they were preserved for centuries; Joseph Smith valued them highly, guarding and concealing them for nearly two years; his close friends regarded them with respect bordering on awe. We must think of them as vital, but the actual part they played, how they facilitated translation, the connection between the characters and Joseph Smith’s mind, at this point remains obscure.


While all these questions are being addressed, I am impressed with the startling fact that Joseph Smith undertook to translate at all. Where did he get it into his head that he, a poorly educated young man with no instruction even in Latin, could undertake to translate an unknown combination of Egyptian and Hebrew characters. He would have known of ministers and lawyers who studied classical languages in college and of course of the learned scholars who translated the King James version in 1611. Perhaps he would have heard of the French genius Champollion who was working on an Egyptian dictionary in these years, but why would Joseph Smith, humble as he was, present himself as a translator as the first act of his budding prophethood? Why would he continue to translate throughout his life, offering the Book of Moses and the Book of Abraham as successors to the Book of Mormon? Apparently, he loved

translating. Think of him sitting there day after day, words spilling from his lips while his assistant tried to get it all down. What in Joseph Smith’s background prepared him for that arduous task or even to present himself in the guise of translator?


The topic of translation is ridden with puzzles. Why did the possibility ever occur to Joseph Smith? How was it done? Why did he persist in translating to the end of his life? None of the other prophetic figures emerging from American religious culture in the nineteenth century presented themselves as translators. Why him? The CES article raises important questions about translation, but there is much else to contemplate.


Sincerely,

Dr. Richard Bushman


Biography:

Richard Lyman Bushman is Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University and the author of many books, including Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling and Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction. He has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Charles Warren Center, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Huntington Library, the Shelby Cullom Davis Center, and the American Antiquarian Society. He co-founded and is chairman of the Board of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts.


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