History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates (original) (raw)
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History and the Claims of Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Materialization of the Golden Plates1
Numen, 2014
The Mormon claim that Joseph Smith discovered ancient golden plates buried in a hillside in upstate New York is too often viewed in simple either/or terms, such that the plates either existed, making Smith the prophet he claimed to be, or did not, making him deceptive or delusional. If we assume that there were no ancient golden plates and at the same that Smith was not a fraud, then the task of historical explanation is more complex. Building on a review of the evidence for the materiality of the plates, the paper uses a series of comparisons — between the golden plates and sacred objects in other religious traditions, between Smith’s claims and claims that psychiatrists define as delusional, and between Smith’s role as a seer and the role of the artist and the physician as skilled perceivers — to generate a greater range of explanatory options. In light of these comparisons, we can view the materialization of the golden plates in naturalistic terms as resulting from an interaction...
How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism
Religion & American Culture, 2021
, an angel visited the bedside of a young Joseph Smith to tell him of one of these objects-a sacred book written on plates of gold, buried on a hillside not far from the Smith family's farm in upstate New York. When, the next day, Smith found the gold plates as directed, the divine being reappeared with further instructions. This time, he forbade Smith from removing the plates but beckoned him to return to the site year after year. In 1827, on Smith's fifth annual visit, the angel finally allowed him to collect the plates and take them home. Over the next several months, Smith kept them securely hidden and revealed them only to a select group of witnesses. Using a seer stone, he translated the plates' inscriptions from their mysterious language into English. Trusted companions served as scribes. The translation revealed that the plates were created several hundred years before the birth of Christ by the angel Moroni and his father Mormon, and recorded the extraordinary history of their Nephite clan, which had migrated to the American continent from Jerusalem. In June 1829, shortly after the translation was complete, Moroni directed Smith to return the gold plates (in some accounts, by depositing them in a cave). Smith obeyed. Then Smith arranged for the publication of the manuscript in nearby Palmyra, which appeared in 1830 as the first edition of the Book of Mormon. 1 If the gold plates are not to be excluded outright from consideration, regarded as fakes or as part of a tall tale, then how might they be incorporated into scholarly explanations? Historians of religion who have confronted this question have approached the story of the plates sympathetically in an effort to recognize its meaning and efficacy for Smith and other early Mormons. By and large, they rely on two interpretative paradigms: religious
Plates revealed through the power of God: Belief and Rationality in early Mormon narratives
Early Mormon foundational narratives – those relating the visions of the religion’s founder Joseph Smith and origins of the Mormon basic text, the Book of Mormon – confuse modern reader accustomed to the clear division between fantasy and reality with perplexing mixture of supernatural elements and common this-worldly facts. On one hand, these stories are populated by culturally postulated super-natural agents, like angels, godly personages and various magical instruments, and abound in descriptions of mystical visions, prophecies and divine truths, which could be substantiated only by faith. On the other hand, they intersperse these tales and base them upon narratives about fact-finding missions, rational analyses and experiments, concluded to obtain verifiable testimonies, evidence and proofs. The modern reader, faced with their intriguing double nature, seems to have only two options. Firstly, he could – if this option is available to him – take them for granted and embrace them without reservation on the basis of the supreme authority of their narrators and their protagonists. In such a case, their rational, empirical part does not matter much. Secondly, he could judge the evidence and logical arguments supplied by their authors by standards of secular modern epistemology. Looking at the Mormon early foundational narratives from this point of view, he could only deem their authors and propagators liars, or, more tolerantly, naive fools, whose thinking is hopelessly limited by medieval frame of mind and poor education. But none of these two stances – neither unconditional acceptance by faith, nor utter dismissal based on endogenous rational categories – constitute the right approach for a social scientist, seeking an accurate comprehension of religious belief.
Mormon studies review, 2005
I Should Have an Eye Single to the Glory of God" : Joseph Smith's Account of the Angel and the Plates R onald Huggins, an assistant professor of theological and histori- cal studies at Salt Lake Theological Seminary, claims that Joseph Smith's account of Moroni and the plates originated as a "moneydigger's yarn" and was later transformed into "restoration history." Huggins believes that "careful study" allows one "to trace the story's development from its earlier to its later version" (pp. 19, 22). Huggins's work, however, hardly qualifies as a careful study. In the first place, he does not account for the complex interweaving of faith and folk culture so common in the early 1800s, an interweaving that made it possible for Joseph Smith to initially live in both religious and "treasure-seeking" worlds. Furthermore, Huggins neglects essential primary documents, obscures the timeline, and hides crucial details. A genuinely careful examination of the textual evidence reveals a pattern quite the opposite of that proposed by Huggins: early accounts of Moroni's visit emphasized restoration history, while later versions introduced Captain Kidd and his ghost.
Performing Revelation: Joseph Smith and the Creation of the Book of Mormon
About the Dissertation: I wrote this thesis during what might best be described as "the information gathering stage" for my research on nineteenth-century oral culture and Joseph Smith's rhetorical skills. It represents a portion of the work that I am still pursuing and developing for a book manuscript.
"Let the Devils Rap": Mormo-materialism and the Rational Supernatural in Mormon Thought
Scholars have written much about the ways in which early members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, including its founder Joseph Smith Jr, engaged in “folk magic” alongside nominally Christian practices. Among those folk-magical practices are the use of seer stones and spirit mediumship. Previous scholarly work on the topic of early Mormon magical practices has sought to contextualize them within the early 19th century American religious milieu of the Second Great Awakening. This paper argues that Mormon folk magic should also be understood as part of an ongoing theological effort to reconcile the religion’s tendency toward scriptural literalism with then-current scientific advances in astronomy, telegraphy, and spiritualism. In doing so, I place early Mormon publications (canonical texts, commentaries, periodicals, and sermons) in dialogue with anthropological works on the construction of religion and science as epistemological categories to show that rather than rejecting science and materialist philosophy in place of theology, many early Mormon writers saw their new faith as offering the key to understanding the natural world in a holistic, rational mode that was both “modern” and grounded in eternal truth.
Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates
A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, 2016
Chapter 9 from A Reason for Faith: In the spring of 1843, a group of men dug into a Native American mound near Kinderhook, Illinois - about seventy-five miles downriver from the Mormon settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois. Several feet into the mound, they found human bones and a set of six brass plates covered with inscriptions. These "Kinderhook plates" were soon brought to Nauvoo. The official History of the Church records that Joseph Smith examined the plates and translated from them. Many years later, two of the men present when the plates were uncovered revealed that the plates had been a hoax. The leader of the excavation had made the plates with some help from the village blacksmith and planted them in the mound just prior to their discovery. In 1980, the one surviving plate was examined and determined to be a modern forgery. This finding has been used to impugn Joseph Smith's credibility as a prophet and translator of ancient scripture. This polemical use of the incident ignores the historical context of Joseph Smith's personal interest in languages. A close investigation of the episode indicates that Smith's "translation" from the Kinderhook plates was an attempt at traditional translation. He had not attempted a translation with divine aid, as he had with the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham, and he did not lead others to believe he had. His incorrect translation of the Kinderhook plates was simply a human error.