Saturday, February 11, 2023

Dirkmaat and Mackay on the need for the plates

  

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)