If
Joseph Smith did not look at the plates as he translated, why did he even need
to get the plates at all?
Because many
Latter-day Saints have envisioned Joseph Smith translating with his hand
running across the characters of the gold plates, the process described by the
witnesses and scribes is sometimes a bit shocking. Since they all mentioned
that Joseph looked at and read words off the stones prepared by God, apparently
after they were placed in a hat, it appears that Joseph did not directly look
at the plates during the translation. If there was no sheet or blanket between
Joseph and his scribes, then the fact the plates were themselves covered during
the translation becomes obvious. Emma served as a scribe at the same table with
Joseph yet did not see the plates themselves, only the cloth they were wrapped
in. Martin Harris served as a scribe for months, but as of March of 1829, as
the text of Doctrine and Covenants 5 confirms, he had not seen the gold plates
yet.
The answer to
the question “Could God have given the text of the text of the Book of Mormon
to Joseph Smith without Joseph’s possession of the plates?” is of course yes.
God in His omnipotence can deliver His word in many miraculous ways. He
certainly could have led Nephi in the wilderness without the Liahona, and Jesus
could have easily healed the blind man without first putting clay on his eyes.
In these cases, even though God had the power to perform the miracle without an
external, physical instrument, He chose to use an object as part of the
miracle.
We do not
know what it took for Joseph to be spiritually prepared to translate the gold
plates in the way God intended. Not only did Joseph struggle for years to
purify himself to be able to even obtain the plates, he also had them in his
possession for months before he began to translate them. During that time Joseph
studied the characters and attempted to create an alphabet of them. (Lucy Mack
Smith, History, 117) perhaps this was a necessary time of preparation
We know that
the translation was not merely a matter of physical mechanics from the story David
Whitmer related about a time Joseph was not sufficiently spiritually prepared
to resume the translation as he normally would:
One morning
when he was getting ready to continue the translation, something went wrong
about the house and he was put out about it. Something that Emma his wife, had
done. Oliver and I went upstairs, and Joseph came up soon after to continue the
translation, but he could not do anything. He could not translate a single
syllable. He went downstairs, out into the orchard, and made supplication to the
Lord; was gone about an hour—came back to the house, asked Emma’s forgiveness,
and then came upstairs where we were and the translation went on all right. He
could do nothing save he was humble and faithful. (“Letter from W. H. Kelley,” Saints’
Herald, March 1, 1882)
David Whitmer
again stressed this fact in a book he published a few years later. He said there
were times when Joseph went to translate, placed the stone into the hat, and
yet would be unable to translate. “He told us,” Whitmer explained, “that his
mind dwelt too much on earthly things” and that was preventing him from
translating as he normally would. Whitmer said that “when in this condition he
[Joseph] would go out and pray, and when he became sufficiently humble before God,
he could then proceed with the translation.” (David Whitmer, An Address to
All Believers in Christ [Richmond, MO, 1887], 30)
In any case,
the possession of the plates seems to have been directly connected with Joseph’s
role as a seer. When he incurred divine displeasure because of his repeated
requests to allow Martin Harris to take the manuscript pages to show family
members, part of Joseph’s punishment consisted of having both the seer stones
and the gold plates taken from him for a time. It is entirely possible that,
however the miracle actually took place, the plates need to be in possession of
the seer for the translation to occur, whether he was looking at them or not.
The plates
also served as a tangible, physical witness that the fantastic work Joseph was
engaged in was not merely some flight or fancy or misunderstood dream. It is relatively
easy for critics to dismiss a person’s revelatory claims. People need not be
deliberately deceitful to believe that the dream they had was in fact some kind
of communication from God or that their powerful personal impression came from
a divine source. It is clear from the totality of Joseph Smith’s life and writings
that he sincerely believed he had been called by God to bring about the Restoration.
But unlike many other religious figures, Joseph claimed a divine calling that
was buttressed by the existence of gold plates. While one can argue someone
could confuse a powerful dream for a miraculous manifestation, no one can
confuse whether or not they have dozens of pounds of metal plates—filled with
ancient, indecipherable characters—on the table in front of them.
The gold
plates physically manifested to Joseph and all of the scribes and witnesses
that this endeavor was not merely a misguided dream or even the influence of
some evil spirit on Joseph. The gold plates connected the present to the
ancient past, declaring via Mormon and Moroni’s work the reality of these
ancient peoples and prophets. The gold plates were and continue to be the
physical proof of Jesus’s visit to the Americas and, consequently of His Resurrection.
(Gerrit J. Dirkmaat and Michael Hubbard Mackay, Let’s Talk About The
Translation of the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2023], 105-7)
