If this has been addressed already, I am sorry to bring it up again. I did a search of the forums and didn’t see it, so I am writing to ask the group if anyone else has knowledge of this.

My older sister is an active member and has been for many years. When I was younger, we’re talking over 20 years ago now, I decided to do some research so that I could better understand her choice to convert. (We were raised Catholic.)

As part of that research, I read a book, the title of which I have forgotten, which took the position that the religion was a cult founded by a known charlatan. One thing I remember the author saying was that the archaeological record of both the animals and plants mentioned in the Book of Mormon were wrong in every instance. In other words, the creatures and foods that the stories included weren’t actually around at the time the stories were set. I mention this in case it sounds familiar and helps someone to identify the book in question.

The thing I am looking to get corroboration on is whether or not Joseph Smith is known to have brought the golden plates to an expert for translation before he supposedly did that himself. I swear I read that he had consulted a well known linguist, possibly in Philadelphia, who told Smith that the markings (I believe said to be “reformed Egyptian” at this point) were not a language but rather gibberish.

I am unable to find any mention of this currently, but my memory is so vivid that I can’t believe I’m making it all up. Should it help anyone’s recall, I also think that Smith went on to publicly claim this expert had in fact completed translations, which the man subsequently vehemently denied, going on the record as saying that Smith was lying and expressing his belief that the plates were phony. All of this was public knowledge at the time as it was reported in newspapers.

Thank you to anyone who has made it this far into my rambling post! Any information on this topic would be much appreciated.

First of all, welcome to this forum. There is a lot of information available from ex-Mormons and sometimes never-Mormons (I'm in the latter category) that may be of interest to you concerning the religion your older sister converted to.

Second, I have been around this site and others since 2007 (I was considering dating an LDS woman at the time) and I have never heard that Joseph Smith ever produced the plates for anyone outside of his wife and a small circle of close associates. Using the terms "Joseph Smith Seeking Golden Plates Translation," in startsearch.com, I came up with several pages, none of which says that Joseph Smith ever attempted to have the plates translated by an expert.

An approved LDS version of the translation story can be found at

https://www.ldsliving.com/how-the-translation-of-the-gold-plates-took-place/s/11461

A much more indepth analysis of what Joseph Smith, his wife, and a close circle of friends said about the golden plates translations can be found at

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/site/the-gold-plates-and-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon

The above link includes links to actual text in .pdf format that was written by Joseph Smith and his followers.

Reading your original post, I'm wondering if you are confusing the golden plates translation with two other stories that took place during Joseph's life. The first was his attempt to get the text of the Book of Mormon copyrighted (I believe this was around 1830), and the second was the Egyptian papyri that was used to create the Pearl of Great Price (Long after his death, that papyri was translated by actual egyptologists to be text on how to conduct an Egyptian funeral). Good luck.

Probably not the book you are looking for, but, Fawn Brodie's biography, "No Man Knows My History", is very well researched and pretty much looks under every stone and covers all things Joseph Smith. Fascinating read for me. She actually had access to a lot of extra information and reference as her uncle was president of the Mormon church at the time and she add access to some of the "vaults".

No one ever directly saw the golden plates. At best, they saw a lump (possibly a brick) with a cloth thrown over it. Most of the original witnesses cited by the Bood of Mormon later recanted, saying that they saw the plates with their "spiritual eyes" only -- meaning only in their imaginations.

I think you might be confusing the BoM with the Book of Abraham, which I believe Joseph did try to get verified (it was later debunked as anything that Joseph said it was.)

Mormon Think is a good source that presents the faithful Mormon view alongside the scholarly and historical evidence:

http://www.mormonthink.com/

Richard Packham also has lots of good materials on his website:

http://packham.n4m.org/tract.htm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_the_Book_of_Mormon

This article is a survey on the historicity of the BoM, and contains links to six more detailed articles on specific topics, like genetics and the BoM, or linguistics and the BoM. It also recounts the Charles Anton story, about an “expert” supposedly confirming the accuracy of some characters and their translation.


Some of the items mentioned in the BoM for which there is no evidence of their existence prior to Columbus: horses, elephants, wheat, honeybees, swords, steel, chariots. No Hebrew calendar, no 7 day week, no decimal counting system (Mayan was base 20, Incan was mixed, mostly base 2 iirc).

Linguistically, no Native American language shows any Hebrew influence. No Semitic DNA. No silver and gold coins.

The BoM has been debunked 8 ways from Sunday. However you are probably wasting your time trying to dissuade your sister. To paraphrase a song from the Book of Mormon musical, she’s a Mormon, and a Mormon just believes. Evidence has nothing to do with it.

It was, in fact, the story of Professor Anthon I was thinking of. Thanks!

All religions are made up so what does it matter that the BoM is a 19th century production passed off as an ancient relic?

Your sister believes it. Whatever. You won't change her mind. TBMs are dependent on the blinders they have on. You can't just take them off. I say let them live in their own little world.

You may be thinking of the book "Studies of the Book of Mormon" by B H Roberts.

It addresses many of the issues you mention.

It’s important to remember that BH Roberts was a general authority and church historian. After all of his research, he didn’t accept the BoM as literal.

+1

It is also important to remember that B H Roberts work is about a century old. A great deal of disconfirming evidence about the BoM came to light in the last 50 years, like genetic and linguistic evidence.

What is remarkable is that Roberts got so very much right, including the linguistics. He shows that sometimes an incisive and honest mind can infer the correct conclusions from a very limited data set.

Roberts is one of the few Mormon luminaries who deserve to be remembered.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2023 01:41PM by Lot's Wife.

misplaced



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2023 02:14PM by Brother Of Jerry.

"I can't have even one shred of doubt, I believe...and a Mormon just believes." "You cannot believe in it half-way, you have to believe in it all..."

Sing it, Andrew Rannells (who originated the role of Elder Price on Broadway)!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVJgmp2Tc2s

"I Believe"

Speaking as a professional juvenile delinquent, I'm surprised that no one from the adult group has mentioned Martin Harris yet.

Martin was the mark (sucker) JoJu (the correct abbreviation of "Joseph Smith, Jr.") sucked money from after coming up with the idea of finding an ancient history about the two "discoveries" of the Americas prior to the ghawd-inspired first voyage of Cristobal Colón.  (I refer to the Jaredites and the Nephite/Lamanite groups.)

During the scamming process, Martin wanted some proof to show others that JoJu was working on translating the Golden Plates (mostly his wife) and so JoJu provided him with a sheet of paper on which some symbols were recorded.  This is now known as the Anthon Transcript "Caractors".

Martin "the sucker" Harris then took this sheet to New York City and showed it to a "leading experts," ending up with Dr. Anthon, who supposedly announced them as genuine, and even doing so in writing!  

But then after writing out his opinion that the markings were "genuine", Dr. Anthon asked to see source material, but was told that this wouldn't be possible, because for religious reasons, the source was sealed off from tawdry pedestrian view.  This angered the good doctor and he asked to be handed back the paper he'd prepared supporting the authenticity of the "caractors," as if he had more to add to it.

But instead, now showing how piqued he was, he proceeded to rip up the paper, and petulanted shouted at Martin Harris (according to the script I've juvenile delinquently imagined), "I can't read an f---ing sealed book, you dumb-ass, sh-t kicking rural farmer boy!!!"

So Martin Harris had to go home with only a memory of the paper confirming the authenticity of the "caractors."

The following link has oodles details:

http://olivercowdery.com/smithhome/2000s/2001RBSt.htm

There are a lot more sources for details on this story, but this one is favored by juvenile deliquents from all walks of high school life.

Don't forget the Mulekites, Jesus. They were among your principal ancestors too.

Where do the all-female Assinians fit into the narrative, Gladys?

"There is a straight line between the ancient Middle Eastern Assinians, their direct descendants the Mulekites, the modern Lamanite, and accordion players."

--Nigel Spivey, Classicist, Oxon

  
  

Good catch.

Possibly you might be thinking of the Harris-Anthon meeting. Anthon told Harris that the BOM "caractors" were nonsense and refused to validate anything, so Smith fabricated his own account of the encounter. When Anthon found out about Harris' & Smith's duplicity, he was furious and publicly denied their entire story.

Here's an attempt to document the Harris - Dr. Anthon story:


https://www.shields-research.org/Scriptures/BoM/BYUSAntn.html


Among mormons, Dr. Anthon has mostly a negative reputation, but during his life he, Dr. Anthon, was held in extremely high regard.

If you read on, this treatise also IDs the 'Dr. Mitchell' whom Dr. Anthon says recommended Martin Harris to him.

There's a good deal of interesting information in the cited article, including the facts surrounding Martin Harris' alienation from JoJu's church and his support of other mormon off-shoots*, all without ever changing anything in his story regarding the origin of the BofM.



*Who knew Martin Harris was an RM?!!?  He served in England for the Strangite branch of mormonism!!

One of the best things my parents ever bought me was a fancy dictionary, which had as an appendix a translation dictionary with a long list of common words and phrases translated into 7 different languages.

Plus I grew up in a city that overwhelmingly consisted of immigrants to the US from around 1900, give or take 15 years. All but one of my HS friends had grandparents for whom English was a second language. I grew up routinely hearing Italian, Polish, Yiddish and Russian.

Pelmini, borscht, kielbasa, halushki, pierogi were food names as common to my neighborhood as taco and burrito today.

Anyway, that dictionary made it easy to see the relationship between various European languages. There was also an appendix of info-european roots found in most or all indo-european languages, which includes not only European languages, but Farsi (Persian) and Sanskrit.

It is estimated that the Slavic languages (like Russian) and the west Germanic languages, including English, diverged about 8,000 years ago. It is easy to spot relationships between English and Russian words. Some are obviously modern borrowings from other languages (i.e. restaurant, soup), but many are words that have been in both languages for thousands of years.

Examples: Russian "goodbye" is "doh svidonya". The vid in the middle of the word is the verb "see", as in "see you later". Vid is also the latin verb for "see", and where we get the words video and visible in English.

Russian numbers: ahdeen (not much like the number one), dwa (similar to two), tre (dead ringer for three), chatiryeh ( not much like four, but similar to quarter, quarto, quatre), pyaht (not much life five, but similar to Greek "pente" and Hindi "pun" (punch was originally a drink from India with 5 ingredients, "Punjab" is the province of 5 rivers)).

To get to my point, it was obvious to me as a HS student that if it was easy to spot relationships between languages that had been separated for many thousands of years, it should be a piece of cake to spot Hebrew influences on Native American languages after a separation of only 2,500 years from Jerusalem. No such relationships have been found.


What Professor Anthon did or did not say is irrelevant. What matters is the evidence that his statement was based on, and regardless of what he is reputed to have said, the evidence does not back up the claimed statement.

As you know, I love this stuff.

Two minor suggestions.

1) The Indo-European languages also included Armenian, a few tongues in Anatolia, several in Central Asia, and two (or three) Tocharian languages in northwestern China.

2) Proto-Balto-Slavic and Proto-Germanic diverged around 5,000 years ago as Yamnaya cultures moved out of the Pontic Steppe and up the Danube, into the Carpathian Basin, and up towards modern Poland. Proto-Indo-European did not even exist until about 6,500 years ago.

Thanks for the updates. I was relying on 65 year old memories of 70 year old material. The science may have been faulty, and my memory certainly is!

Pretty good memory, methinks.

The best modern summary is a dense tome by David Anthony entitled "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language." I've read it from cover to cover multiple times because the material is fascinating but those who don't need massive corrective lens may choose different entertainment options.

The references you are looking for are very important. I left the church at 23 knowing in my gut it was not what it claimed. But I had no facts. There was no Google. There was no DNA testing of ancient peoples so why couldn't the Native Americans be Lamanites?. There was no good reason I knew of that the Aztec and Mayan ruins weren't Nephite/Lamanite. I could go on. But I had to trust myself. And I had to do that when the whole family was telling me I was wrong and that Satan had deceived me.

Decades later I happened on Fawn Brodie's book and found a very well researched biography of Joseph and history of the Mormon church that was not what I was taught. We got the Reader's Digest version from the Mormons with all the smoking guns and red flags and absurdity removed back in the 50's and 60's.

That book was such a welcome piece of the puzzle. I needed to know the facts. I needed to see it referenced and footnoted and read excerpts from newspapers and diaries and on and on.

I wish I could thank Fawn in person. What a gift. The peace she gave me. It mattered. Still, would have been okay without that. Some things are just too damn obvious.

A lot of original research was done by Jared & Sandra Tanner, believing Mormons who researched LDS out of love and historical fascination--only to discover and publicize problematic truths.
Jared is deceased, and Sandra is very old and retired, but much of their work is now archived at utlm.org. they were amateur, but very diligent--and honest--historians.