Monday, July 13, 2020

Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee on William Clayton Having the Kinderhook Plates Being Discovered in Adams County and not Pike County

Don Bradley (often with Mark Ashurst-McGee) has done excellent work on the Kinderhook Plates, including:

 

"President Joseph Has Translated A Portion": Solving the Mystery of the Kinderhook Plates

 

(with Ashurst-McGee), The Kinderhook Plates

 

Such work has caused LDS apologists to revise some of our previous discussions of this topic. As one example, note the following from Jeff Lindsay (who also provides a good overview of Don’s thesis):

 

An excellent though slightly dated article on the Kinderhook plates is "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax" by Dr. Stanley B. Kimball in the Ensign, August 1981, pp. 66-74.

Kimball explains that Joseph's lack of action with the fraud shows no lasting interest. However, his remarks need to be updated based on more recent work from Don Bradley, a Mormon, who uncovered evidence that Joseph Smith attempted to translate a character on the Kinderhook plates that was similar to a character in the so-called Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar book that Joseph and/or his scribes made in an apparent effort to figure how to translate the Book of Abraham. John Gee has explained why it appears that the Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar were composed after Joseph's inspired translation as a means of intellectually understanding the meaning of Egyptian, not as a tool to do the translation in the first place (see). See Bradley's presentation at FAIRBlog.org. The Kinderhook character that resembled a character in the Egyptian Alphabet & Grammar was assigned the same translated text as provided therein. This appears to be evidence that Joseph Smith attempted to apply what he was doing on his own with the Book of Abraham text in an attempt to create a secular translation of the Kinderhook plates. One character, that's all. See "A FAIR Analysis of MormonThink page 'The Kinderhook Plates'." Perhaps there was initial interest and perhaps he took them seriously for a brief while, but then they were abandoned. I don't know if he concluded they were a fraud or not, but after that initial interest, they were apparently dropped. [End of update.]

 

One question that persists is why Clayton would have the plates as being found in Adams County, while the plates were actually found in Pike County. In a recent expansion of their work on the Kinderhook Plates in the book, Producing Ancient Scripture, Bradley and Ashurst-McGee argue that this information could reasonably be explained as having come from Joseph Smith himself:

 

In writing about what he heard regarding the circumstances of their “discovery,” Clayton stated that the plates had been “found in Adams County,” whereas they had actually been disinterred near Kinderhook, in Pike County. Based on this factual error, Stanley B. Kimball questioned the accuracy of what Clayton wrote about Smith’s translation (Kimball, “Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax,” 73). Though Clayton’s location of the site of disinterment was inaccurate, it makes some sense that Clayton would have associated the Kinderhook plates with Adams, the county between Hancock (including Nauvoo) and Pike (including Kinderhook). The seat of Adams County was Quincy, an important river town in western Illinois. Quincy was about fifty miles downriver from Nauvoo, in the southern half of Adams County, and Kinderhook was a much smaller town that was located just a few miles beyond the southern border of Adams and Pike. The plates had been originally shown to Joseph Smith by Joshua Moore, who was apparently boarding in Quincy. While in Nauvoo, Moore also showed the plates to Charlotte Haven, who wrote that “they were recently found, he said, in a mound a few miles below Quincy” (haven to “My dear home friends,” 630 [emphasis added]). If Moore indeed told Haven that the plates were found a few miles below Quincy, he most likely said the same thing to Smith, understandably locating the find in terms of Quincy—a much larger municipality and a better known geographical reference point.

 

When Smith visited with others about the Kinderhook plates, he likely passed on information he received from Moore, including where the plates had been found and the location of the discovery with reference to Quincy . . . Apostle Willard Richards, who was keeping Smith’s journal at the time, would write in Smith’s journal entry for 7 May 1843 that the plates were “dug out of a mound near quncy [Quincy]” (Smith, Journal, 7 May 1843, in JSP-J3:13. When this journal entry was utilized in the text of Smith’s history, it was revised to “dug out near Kinderhook.” Smith, History, vol. D-1, 1547). Thus apostles Young and Richards both wrote that the plates were found “near Quincy” while examining the plates at Smith’s home, which seemingly points to Smith as the common source of their information. Smith probably told Clayton the same thing, which would explain why Clayton located the discovery of the plates in Adams County (instead of Pike County). In terms of what Clayton wrote about Smith translating from the plates, the precise location of their discovery is not really the relevant issue, but rather what Smith had communicated to Clayton. That Clayton’s error in locating the site of disinterment likely came from Smith actually increases the compelling force of what he wrote about Smith having “translated a portion” of the plates. (Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, “’President Joseph Has Translated a Portion’: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates,” in Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee and Brian Hauglid, eds., Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity [Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2020], 452-523, here, pp. 484-86)