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)