Did Joseph Smith Fall for the Kinderhook Plates?

[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I've heard that Joseph Smith has been proven a fraud because he tried to translate a known hoax known as the Kinderhook Plates. Welcome to Informed Saints. My name is Jasmine. Neil. And Steven. And Neil, what's going on with the Kinderhook plates? [00:00:15] Speaker B: Yeah, so the Kinderhook plates were a hoax. Let's just be clear about that in the outset. They were found in the town of Kinderhook, which is hence why they're called the Kinderhook Plates. That was a town about 60 or 70 miles south of Nauvoo, and they were discovered in, like, an Indian burial mound. And they had. I think there was 12 of them, if I'm remembering correctly. They're like these small brass plates that are in, like, a bell shape. We can show an image of one of them. There's only one surviving plate. [00:00:49] Speaker A: Now, when you say plates, I'm thinking, like, gold plates. But that's not what you're. [00:00:53] Speaker B: Well, there's no. They're. I mean, they're small. You know, Josh Coates made chocolates that were to scale. [00:00:59] Speaker C: That's right. [00:01:00] Speaker B: Of the kinder hook call back to be amulet. [00:01:03] Speaker A: Like a stack of a book or something. [00:01:05] Speaker B: They're like. They're like shaped like bells, kind of. And there was like 12 of them. Okay. And then they were like, they were bound by a ring, and they had, like, they had characters, an inscription all over them or what looked like an inscription. And they were discovered in this mound, and they were brought to Nauvoo in, like, May, I think, the first week of May, 1843. And there was a lot of hoopla about this as they came into town. Everyone in Nauvoo, including non Mormons, non Latter Day Saints, were very curious about what was going on here. And there was this anticipation, this hope that Joseph Smith was going to translate these ancient records. And frankly, from a Latter Day Saint perspective, they were probably expecting new revelation, new scripture. [00:01:53] Speaker A: Kind of like the Book of Mormon. [00:01:54] Speaker B: Kind of like the Book of Mormon. In fact, there is an account where. But they say something to the effect of, you know, there will be a sequel to the Book of Mormon soon. [00:02:04] Speaker C: It may be worth pointing out what the motivation was of the guys who forged the Kinderhook plates. [00:02:10] Speaker A: Yeah. Were they trying to, like, make money? Were they trying to make. Make a fool of Joseph Smith? What's going on here? [00:02:15] Speaker C: Apparently, it was a joke. It was just meant to be a joke. One of the guys named Wilbur Fugate, who was one of the guys who made the Hoax. He later gave accounts. He's also the guy that kind of copped to it that it was a hoax all along. He said it started out as a joke after reading Parley P. Pratt's A Voice of Warning, which talked about truth will spring forth out of the earth. [00:02:37] Speaker A: So he was inspired by the Latter Day Saints. [00:02:39] Speaker C: Yeah, he was. But, like, it does not appear to have been, like, a malicious attempt to entrap Joseph Smith or something. That sometimes is how it's kind of framed. It really seems like they were just doing it for a lark, he said in a later letter. He said he conceived a little plan by which to startle the natives. Meaning, like, I think, the people living around the town. Right. Like, so, I don't know. It seems. And this is some of the research that Now Mark Ashurst McGee and Don Bradley and some others have pointed out, like the. For a long time, the motive was assumed to be nefarious. Seems like he was just having a lark with people, right? Just kind of messing around with them. [00:03:14] Speaker B: There's Will, there's Wilbur Fugate, and there's a guy named Robert Wiley who kind of decided to do this hoax, this joke. And they employed a blacksmith. I say employed. I don't know if they actually paid [00:03:26] Speaker C: him for it, but he was part of the. [00:03:27] Speaker B: He was part of the cabal, if you will. Bridger. [00:03:31] Speaker C: Bridge Whit. [00:03:32] Speaker B: Bridge Whitman. That's right. I was gonna say Bridger, but Bridge Whitten, and he's the one who, like, cuts the brass. [00:03:38] Speaker C: And then they treated them to make them look ancient. [00:03:41] Speaker B: They treat them with, like, acid and stuff like that to make them look ancient. And they use, like, these beeswax. Like, they carved the etchings into the inscriptions into beeswax, and then they used acid to burn the thing into the plate. And that's called etching. So there's a distinction between etching and engraving something, right? That's the process that's known as etching, where you actually just burn it onto the surface, right? And so anyway, these plates come into town, it's May 1843. And the way they're discovered is one of them claims to have, like, a dream or a revelation, if I'm remembering correctly. And they lead them to this. They lead a bunch of townspeople to this hill, townspeople in Kinderhook, to this hill. And then they dig into the hill and they find these plates, right? [00:04:32] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:04:33] Speaker B: And this is actually. This is actually a very common trope, if you will, method that's used by hoaxers. Hoaxers and Forgers at the time, you see this kind of. You see accounts like this all the time. They bring these people to there and they dig them up. And so then they have these witnesses and, like, give statements to kind of confirm, like, this came out of the ground. This came out of the ground. [00:04:59] Speaker A: The provenance is. [00:05:00] Speaker B: And they have the witnesses who will say, oh, that, you know, I could see that the ground was undisturbed before they dug and all of this stuff. So it makes it seem like it's this really authentic thing. And then they parade it around and they take it to Joseph Smith. They're hoping he will translate it. Yeah. [00:05:19] Speaker C: What's fun is when they bring it to Nauvoo, it kind of goes gangbusters with the Latter Day Saints, understandably. So, like John Taylor in the newspaper, he. He publishes a facsimile of the Kinderhook plates, which you can look up online. And. [00:05:31] Speaker B: And that's. Yeah, that's what we have to base what they looked out like, because other than the one plate. Right. We just have. [00:05:37] Speaker C: We just have these facsimiles that John Taylor published. And he's excited. He thinks, like, you know, this will be additional confirmation for the Book of Mormon Parlor. P. Pratt writes a letter to a friend saying, hey, these plates came into Nauvoo, and we're confident that this is going to be good for our faith. And so, yeah, there's excitement in Nauvoo, understandably, as there is in the broader community. [00:06:00] Speaker A: So are the Saints just like, suckers? Can they not see through this? Why would it have been so believable? [00:06:06] Speaker B: Well, I also think it's just important to mention that we're making these assessments in hindsight. We know in hindsight that this is the way that forgers operated, getting these witnesses together and making these statements and stuff. But people in the 19th century, they didn't necessarily know that every time that happened, or pretty much every time that happened, it was hoaxers. Right. There was like, the country was new, the land was new to them. [00:06:31] Speaker C: Archaeology is a young science. [00:06:33] Speaker B: Archaeology is new. In fact, I think most people would agree that, like, formally, archaeology as a science doesn't really exist yet. Right. And so the idea that you could dig into the ground and find ancient artifacts, just happen upon them, like, everyone believed that. Right. It was. It was pretty widely believed. It's why these. It's why hoaxers could do what they do and be so successful in the 19th century doing this. [00:06:58] Speaker A: So the Saints are hooked. [00:07:00] Speaker B: The Saints are hooked by this, are they? [00:07:02] Speaker C: Dare I Say they are kinder hooked. [00:07:04] Speaker B: It's not just, it's not the kinder hook. It's not just the Saints though, because there are like the editor of the New York Herald is showing and you know, they're publishing stuff on this. They're showing interest. The Quincy wig. I think the Quincy wig was being a little sarcastic. But you know, some pretend to say that the Smith Mormon leader has the ability to read them. If Smith can decipher the hieroglyphs on the plates, he will do more towards throwing light on the early history of this content than any man now living. Right. Like I think they're being a little sarcastic, but there's, there's kind of genuine interest. Charlotte Haven, who was a non Latter Day Saint at the time, she wrote about it showing interest. She described people saying that the figures were similar to that which was on which the Book of Mormon was written. Other people talked about the figures from the papyri that Joseph Smith had Egyptian papyri. And that's I think the important. That actually is maybe a good segue to what did Joseph Smith actually do when he got these? There's a bunch of people reacting to this, but what about Joseph Smith? So they're taken to Joseph and we have entries in his journal. We have writings from other people who were with him at the time who talk about this. [00:08:15] Speaker C: William Clayton is the big. [00:08:16] Speaker B: William Clayton is a major source. So the plates are shown to Joseph Smith and he actually asks what he doesn't do I think is kind of important. He doesn't say, someone fetch me my seer stone or the Urim and Thummim. Right. He doesn't ask for his divine. His divine revelatory instruments. He does ask. He says in Joseph Smith's journal it says he sent for his Hebrew Bible and lexicon. [00:08:47] Speaker A: He had studied Hebrew by this point. [00:08:49] Speaker B: He had studied Hebrew by this point. He had a lexicon for that. And then he also a non Latter Day Saint eyewitness in a letter that was published in the New York Herald. This is the New York Herald source I was referring to. He identifies himself as a Gentile. I can't remember if we know who this person was or not off the top of my head. But he's an eyewitness. He's present when Joseph Smith is first shown the plates. He said he compared them in my presence with his Egyptian Alphabet which he took from the plates which the Book of Mormon was translated. And they are evidently the same characters. Now this guy, Book of Mormon Alphabet, this guy is a Little mixed up. He thinks this Egyptian Alphabet was taken from the plates. But as Stephen could tell us and know as well, the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar that they had, that was made during Kirtland, was produced in Kirtland, was based off of the Egyptian papyri. Right. [00:09:45] Speaker A: So the pearl of great price stuff. [00:09:47] Speaker B: The pearl of great price stuff. And Parley P. Pratt, in the letter that Stephen mentioned earlier, also says that the Kinderhook plates were being compared to the characters with those on the Egyptian papyrus, which is now in this city. So it appears that the main comparison was happening with the Egyptian papyri, which [00:10:08] Speaker C: are there in Nauvoo. [00:10:09] Speaker B: Which are there in Nauvoo. [00:10:10] Speaker C: Lucy Mack Smith and Joseph Smith are showing people, including Charlotte Haven and others will and look at it and they will compare them with the Book of Mormon sometimes some of these accounts. And here they're comparing them with the Kinderhook plates. [00:10:22] Speaker B: They're comparing them with the Kinder. [00:10:23] Speaker C: It's understandable. Why, if you assume that Kinderhook plates are authentic, do we have any other authentic relics in the city that we can compare this with? Oh, yeah, we have Egyptian papyri we can compare it with. It just totally makes sense why they would want. [00:10:34] Speaker A: It doesn't have the gold plates anymore. [00:10:35] Speaker C: Exactly. So it makes sense why you'd want to default to comparing it with either the papyri or this quote Egyptian grammar and Alphabet that they had come up with in Kirtland. [00:10:43] Speaker A: So he's comparing it to some characters that he has access to that are ancient. Does he try to attempt a translation on these Kinderhook plates? [00:10:51] Speaker B: So there is kind of a famous quote and it sometimes gets quoted as if it's coming firsthand from Joseph Smith because that's how it got published in [00:11:00] Speaker C: History of the Church. [00:11:01] Speaker B: The History of the Church, the seven volume history of the church from the 19th century. But it's actually from William Clayton, President J. [00:11:10] Speaker C: Or Joseph. President Joseph has translated a poet portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. And he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth. [00:11:27] Speaker A: Okay. So I mean, that is quite a lot of information that ties to like Book of Mormon lore, you could say. [00:11:35] Speaker B: Well, so. [00:11:36] Speaker C: Or Book of Abraham, Lord. [00:11:37] Speaker B: Well, Book of Abraham lore. More. So Pilot. [00:11:39] Speaker C: Pilot does connect it with Book of [00:11:41] Speaker B: Mormon, identifies a Jaredite. Yeah, but that's not in the William Clayton account. That's not in the William Clayton Account. A lot of what Parley P. Pratt is consistent with the Clayton account. I think Parley P. Pratt is just rationalizing, well, if he's in the Americas, [00:11:54] Speaker C: he's got to be a Jaredite. [00:11:55] Speaker B: He must have been a Jaredite. [00:11:56] Speaker A: So Parley P. Pratt connects it to Jaredites. William Clayton connects it to the descendant of Pharaoh from Ham. But those are things that are in Latter Day Saint lore. So if you took like a maybe maximalist position that this is Joseph Smith. Joseph Smith is like trying to attempt to translate and he really believes that these Kinderhook plates are coming directly from the same milieu as the Book of Mormon or the Book of Abraham even. But it sounds like maybe there's another interpretation going on here. [00:12:28] Speaker B: So this is where the paper by Mark Ashurst McGee and Don Bradley in this book producing ancient Scripture. And they also have kind of a shorter version of it in A Reason for Faith published by the Religious Studies center at byu. This one's published by the University of Utah. So I guess rival university presses here, they actually they compared, they went through the facsimiles of the Kinderhook plates that were published by John Taylor, like Steven mentioned earlier, and they, they took these accounts that are saying, hey, these are being compared to the Egyptian characters, the Egyptian Alphabet and stuff like that. They took those accounts and said, okay, well what if we go through the characters on the facsimiles of the, of the Kinderhook plates and what if we compare those to what we find in the Egyptian Alphabet and see what we find. And on one of the facsimiles of the plates there is really prominently up at the top and we'll put it on screen so that people can see there's like a sideways D shaped figure. Like a boat. Kind of like a boat. Yeah, it's like a boat figure and it's got like some additional lines on it and stuff like that, but that very prominent character there. You then go into the Egyptian Alphabet and there is an entry there with a sideways D, a sort of boat shaped figure there. And what it says on that entry, the way this boat shaped character is defined in the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar is honor by birth, kingly power by the line of pharaoh, possession by birth, one who reigns upon his throne, universally, possessor of heaven and earth and of the blessings of the earth. [00:14:11] Speaker A: And the Egyptian Alphabet is kind of like a makeshift glossary that it appears some of the saints were making with the Book of Abraham. They were trying to identify characters. [00:14:20] Speaker B: Well, I think at this point we don't really know what the Egyptian Alphabet is. Stephen can probably speak to, like, the nature of those documents better than I can. But the one prevailing theory, or one working theory is that these are the attempts of Joseph Smith and probably mostly William W. Phelps to kind of reverse engineer or reverse translate the. I say reverse translate to try and decipher the Egyptian characters based on. Maybe not based on. Some of it seems to be coming from. Drawing from the Book of Abraham. Some of it really is. [00:14:59] Speaker C: It's just coming from nowhere or like, just. It's coming from, you know, no other known source. [00:15:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So. So, but there seems to be the current evidence or the current thinking, and again, there's no consensus on this. So there you're going to have people who will dispute all of this. But basically, the Book of Abraham translation already exists, and they seem to be working from that and trying to decipher the actual Egyptian characters, trying to figure out how it relates to the actual papyri. They're assuming it's coming from the Horror Book of Breathings papyri, specifically. [00:15:29] Speaker C: Well, and I will just add there, the. The recent scholarship by Michael McKay and Dan Belknap and Kerry Muhlstein and others have shown a lot of these characters in the grammar and Alphabet, this Gale document. Right. They're coming from, like, nowhere. They're just being sort of made up. They're not coming from the papyrus. Some of them are coming from, like, a Masonic cipher book. Like, they're. And so they argue that a part of it is like they're attempting to recapture the pure language. It ties into that. So it's kind of this hodgepodge thing. But to Jasmine's question, yes, part of this seems to be some sort of an attempt to give a lexical glossary to quote Egyptian characters. Right. [00:16:07] Speaker A: And they're using that document to then [00:16:10] Speaker B: help them with their Kinderhook plates and comparing against the Kinderhook plates. And so you can see, though, from the meaning of this one character as it's interpreted in the Egyptian Alphabet, you see all the major elements of the statement from William Clayton. Right. Descendant of Ham. Well, line of Pharaoh through the loins of Pharaoh. Right. Descent of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh. [00:16:32] Speaker C: Ruler. [00:16:33] Speaker B: Ruler. King of Egypt. Even the heaven and earth of Heaven and earth. Right, exactly. So what appears to have happened is Joseph Smith is shown these plates. He's maybe flipping through them. There's, like I said, there's only like 12. Or maybe there's six. There's six that are. [00:16:49] Speaker C: It looks like there's 12 because on the text there's back inside. But yeah, there's six. [00:16:53] Speaker B: There's six that are double sided as far as their inscription goes or their fake inscription goes. And so he's kind of flipping through there. He calls for his Hebrew Bible and lexicon. He apparently also gets his Egyptian Alphabet brought over to come. And, and he's looking over these characters and he goes, huh, that looks similar to this character here. [00:17:14] Speaker C: Make a note of that, William. [00:17:15] Speaker B: Yeah, make. No. And, and so then he goes, oh, he, he maybe says something to the effect of oh, this must contain the history of the person who these were found with. That would be a logical assumption to make for anyone. Right. Under the circumstances. And he, based on this character here, well, he must have been a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and he received his kingdom through the ruler of heaven and earth. Right. Like that's what this symbol means. [00:17:39] Speaker A: So that's one possible speculative reconstruction of how this scene could have gone. [00:17:43] Speaker C: Yeah. I want to add one more thing here, by the way. In addition to. He talks about, he examines the Alphabet and grammar, his Hebrew lexicon. Fugate himself. In a letter to James Cobb in 1878, he takes it a step further. He says that Joseph wanted to send the plates to the Antiquarian Society in Philadelphia before he would translate them. He says, we understand Joe Smith said they would make a book of 1200 pages, but he would not agree to translate them until they were sent to the Antiquarian Society of Philadelphia, France and England. Now this is a late second, third hand account, so take that with a big grain of salt. But this does resonate and it is in harmony with the idea that Joseph is looking for secular means to try to understand what might be in these plates that for as much as he and the saints know are authentic. This seems to indicate some skepticism though that he's authenticated. [00:18:39] Speaker B: He wants them sent to these historical societies to basically examine. Authenticated first. Right. [00:18:45] Speaker C: I do also want to add real quick if I may, because I can anticipate some critics in the comments and elsewhere also bringing up this point. Well, if Joseph Smith used the grammar and Alphabet to try to translate the Kinderhook plates, doesn't that mean that he wrote the grammar and Alphabet and he thought that it was real and authentic [00:19:01] Speaker A: and that's how they translated and that's how they. [00:19:03] Speaker C: And that's how they translate the book of Abraham? No, that is a non sequitur. At a minimum, what this means is that Joseph perhaps saw value in it as a lexical tool for understanding ancient inscriptions or ancient languages. It does not mean he authored it. It does not mean he was the one using it to translate the Book of Abraham. William Phelps could have been the. And I think it's probably likely that William Phelps is the primary author and creator of the grammar and Alphabet documents that Joseph Smith knows about. All it means is he thought this could be useful in my comparative analysis. [00:19:34] Speaker B: He. He considered it as reliable as like a Hebrew lexicon. [00:19:39] Speaker C: That's all this means. [00:19:40] Speaker B: That's. That's kind of what it indicates. And you know, we. That might seem a little silly to us because we know just kind of how unrelated to actual Egyptian that is. But, you know, they don't know that at the time. Right. And he's. He believes. Joseph Smith believes in the efforts that William Phelps and stuff are making. I mean, I think it does tell us that they aren't like these totally independent. Like he knows what they're doing. [00:20:02] Speaker C: Right. [00:20:02] Speaker B: And he thinks, like, they might be onto something. [00:20:05] Speaker C: Right. But it does not mean he's the author. It doesn't mean it's the translation key to the Book of Abraham, which I hear people say. So that's just a side note. [00:20:12] Speaker B: So basically what seems to have happened is, is whether, honestly, this is the best explanation out there. [00:20:20] Speaker C: I think so. [00:20:21] Speaker B: From Bradley and Mark Ashurst McGee. And I know Mark watches the show. He's texted me before about it. So I'm sorry if we've butchered any of your stuff here, Mark, but I think that's the best explanation out there. Regardless of whether you go along with Don and Mark on this, though, the direct historical sources are telling us that all he did was compare it to [00:20:46] Speaker C: a single character with his grammar and Alphabet. [00:20:49] Speaker B: Right. He compared it to his translation tools that he had. He did not. Like I said, he never called for his seer stone, despite the anticipation that the sequel to the Book of Mormon was going to come from these plates. That just never happened. Right. The extent to which he translated appears to be a single character. Right. [00:21:11] Speaker C: And by translation, to be clear, we mean he compared it with something that was already been done and saw perhaps a connection there. [00:21:18] Speaker B: Right. [00:21:18] Speaker C: It's. It's a translation in that sense. Right. [00:21:22] Speaker B: There doesn't seem to be any sort of divine or revelatory aspect to this process. And then the plates just leave Nauvoo. They. We don't. Do we even know where they go after that? [00:21:32] Speaker C: I think they probably track the history in the article. I can't recall but like. [00:21:36] Speaker B: Like Stephen said, there was some. There's some indication that maybe Joseph wanted them examined in Philadelphia and London and stuff like that, and they never come back to the latter. Well, I think they do maybe come back into Nauvoo briefly, like in June or something like that. And there's still some expectation that maybe Joseph will translate them, but he just never does. [00:21:53] Speaker C: He never does. [00:21:53] Speaker B: He just never does. And you could say that's just because he was super busy and overwhelming. I mean, this is 1843. There's a lot going on. Busy guy, busy guy. [00:22:02] Speaker C: But here's the thing. If he wanted them to stay in Nauvoo, he could have had them stay in Nauvoo. [00:22:06] Speaker A: I mean, think back on the Book of Abraham. [00:22:09] Speaker C: Indeed, when he saw those papyri rolls, he wanted them in Kirtland. And so he went to Saints when they were poor and building the Kirtland temple and said, we got to raise money to purchase these antiquities. He doesn't care about the mummies. He wants the scrolls. Yeah, well, it's a package deal. Michael Chandler says you've got to take the mummies. But the point is, if he wanted them, he could have bought them. They could have stayed there. [00:22:31] Speaker B: He could have. [00:22:32] Speaker C: Could have arranged them to remain in Nauvoo, to stay. [00:22:35] Speaker B: He could have arranged to have them purchased so that they wouldn't go anywhere, but he doesn't. And he seems to want them authenticated by an outside source, which he didn't with the papyri. He trusted that those were genuinely ancient sources. So I think the. The first takeaway I think we can have from this is the. The hoax. He doesn't quite fall for it. It's. It's fair to say he didn't see through it totally, I think, but it doesn't work. Right. It there. It. He doesn't seem to, like. [00:23:02] Speaker A: We don't get a sequel to the book. [00:23:04] Speaker C: We don't get a book of Kinderhook. Right. There's nothing like that. [00:23:07] Speaker B: And this is actually one of the things that's, like, really compelling to me is if Joseph Smith is just a charlatan who. Who, like, finds ancient scrolls and makes up a Book of Abraham on the whim. Right. Who makes up. Makes up the Book of Mormon on the whim. Right. Like, or however you think he did it, if he's someone who can just make up scripture and things like that, then why didn't he do that here? Yeah, I think that's a. That's a fair question to ask. Why didn't he see these plates? Especially like, hey, he's got a little head start with his, with the Egyptian Alphabet and grammar and the comparison of this character. He's, there's a, there's a whole story he could have spun off of these 12 plates. And apparently, I mean, Fugate claims he was going to produce 1200 pages or he thought they could translate to 1200 pages. I'm not sure how seriously we should take that statement from Fugate. [00:23:57] Speaker C: You got to take it with a grain of salt. [00:23:58] Speaker B: But still the point being there's, there's, I think a real question like if he's, if he's a charlatan who can just make stuff up and does just make stuff up, make up scriptures based on this stuff, why didn't he do that here? And there's a quote, I think it's useful from Richard Bushman. People sometimes use Bushman to be like, oh, Joseph Smith fell for this. But they don't read the full context of Bushman's section on the Kinderhook plates, which mind you is 20 years old now. Right, yeah, more recent scholarship anyway. But here's what Bushman said in full. Well, his full like summary paragraph, conclusion paragraph. After the first meeting, no further mention was made of translation and the Kinderhook plates dropped out of sight. Joseph may not have detected the fraud, but he did not swing into a full fledged translation as he had with the Egyptian scrolls. The trap did not quite spring shut, which foiled the conspirators original plan. Instead of exposing the plot immediately, as they had probably intended to do, they said nothing until 1879 when one of them signed an affidavit describing the fabrication. So if it like, I think that's just one of the, like, the biggest point to make here is Joseph Smith did not really seem to quite fall for it. He maybe didn't see through. He maybe thought they were real, but no inspiration came to him. And to me that's actually indication that like his revelatory gift was actually real. Because if he tried to get inspiration from these, he may have, for all we know. He may. He looked at him, nothing came. No revelation came that, oh, you know anything about this. And so he just kind of let him go and didn't worry about him. Now there's also another insight from this that comes from our friend Tanner that I think is worth bringing up too, which is Joseph Smith did sincerely seem to believe that at least it could be authentic, it could be a genuine record which is actually kind of Strange if you think about it. Because if he was. Well, it's strange if you assume the Book of Mormon was made up. Right. If he is, if he's a hoaxer himself, if he's a con man himself who made a fake set of plates and conned people with them, then you would think he would be immediately suspicious. [00:26:14] Speaker C: Game recognizes game. [00:26:15] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. You think he'd be immediately suspicious the moment someone else brings it, oh, gee, I found these plates in a hill. Like, he'd be like, wait a second, [00:26:25] Speaker A: I've seen that done before. [00:26:28] Speaker B: They're taking something out of his own playbook. Right. Well, he's gonna recognize that. Right. He's gonna see that coming. And you wouldn't think that he would be sincerely interested in him, but he does. He takes them seriously. He uses translation tools that he believes are reliable, that are available to him, that are available to him to try and maybe understand it. Like I said, he doesn't seem to ever receive any kind of revelation about them. And so then he wants them actually examined by, you know, Antiquarian Society. Antiquarian Society. [00:26:57] Speaker C: According to Fugate. [00:26:58] Speaker A: According to Fugate, that's what he did with the gold plates. He sent them off to scholars. [00:27:02] Speaker B: That's true. That's true. He did do the same thing. And in fact, I think it's the Antiquarian Society in Philadelphia, in addition to the scholars in New York, I think Martin Harris also went to Philadelphia for that purpose. But so I think that's also kind of interesting. Like, there's a dynamic where he seems to be sincerely interested in them, but also doesn't seem to receive any sort of revealed translation. And so there's like, kind of this twofold way that it, in some ways, I think, demonstrates Joseph Smith's sincerity as a prophet and as a revelator. [00:27:31] Speaker C: I think we just have to kind of be okay with. Prophets are allowed to have sincere speculative misunderstandings of things sometimes. Like. [00:27:41] Speaker A: Well, this reminds me of, like, the Hoffman forgeries. [00:27:44] Speaker C: Sure. [00:27:44] Speaker A: Like, a lot of people said, how come the prophet, like, didn't have the gift of discernment to discern that the feelings were fakes? [00:27:51] Speaker C: Right. [00:27:51] Speaker A: It's like, but they're also men. And that wasn't part of their prophetic purview under their prophetic stewardship. I mean, they're just. They said, let's give it to the historians and see what they think about it. [00:28:00] Speaker C: It kind of boils down to, do you assume prophetic infallibility and prophetic inerrancy all the time. Right. The Light switch is always on in all occasions, in all instances for Joseph Smith and other prophets. And if they ever utter a single syllable that isn't 100% true all the time, well, then they're false prophets and we can't believe them. And they're just all con men and making them. It's like, come on, guys, are we going to. Are we going to have that insane assumption about how these people are supposed to live? They're not allowed to have sincere misunderstandings or just take a shot in the dark or, heck, even be bamboozled sometimes by people, right? Sincerely be tricked by people sometimes. Like, I'm okay with that, with my profits. Maybe some people in the comments are. But I don't have a problem with it. Reading Rick Turley's book on this, which I highly recommend. From what I recall from memory, one of the big reasons why the church purchased the Hoppin forgeries was precisely to try to get them authenticated, right? They brought in the experts, and the initial assessment was, yeah, these look legitimate. Okay, let's secure them. Let's. And let's secure them and subject them to proper academic and scholarly study and analysis and scrutiny. So. [00:29:07] Speaker B: Well, we absolutely need to have a separate episode on the Hoffman Ford. So. So those are, I think, two big takeaways from this episode is like, I actually think people like to use it as, like, oh, you know, this just proves that Joseph Smith didn't really have the gift of prophecy. I actually think it proves his sincerity at the very least. And that, again, it's. It's a little strange to me that, you know, if he, even if his inspiration isn't real, but it's sincere, he could have been fool. If he were really fooled by these, he could have been fooled into producing a full translation, an inspired translation. The fact that he didn't do that, like, again, I think that speaks to the conspicuous. It's conspicuous. It speaks to the legitimacy of his gift of translation for me. So in the Book of Mormon, when Ammon, not the missionary Ammon, but the [00:29:55] Speaker C: discoverer and the explorer, the one who [00:29:57] Speaker B: goes and finds the lost colony down in the land of Lehi Nephi, he's talking to Limhi, and Limhi's talking about how they sent an expedition and they found these records, which we now know are the Jaredite records, and he wants them translated. Ammon says, I can assuredly tell thee, o king of a man, that can translate the records, for he has wherewith he can look a seer stone, right? Or the Nephite interpreters the Nephite interpreters and translate all records that are of ancient date. And it is a gift from God. Right. And so the gift of translation that Joseph professes to have is directly related to this. Right. It's a gift to translate records of ancient date. [00:30:37] Speaker C: Ancient ones. [00:30:37] Speaker B: Well, the Kindred aren't ancient. And so he doesn't seem to actually ultimately have the gift of translation here. And so like we've mentioned before, he just kind of lets them go and they kind of fade off into the sunset. Into the sunset to never really be a big factor. [00:30:54] Speaker C: It is true that Latter Day Saints for many decades afterwards still believe they're authentic. You will see them occasionally get cited in apologetic literature from the late 19th century, early 20th century. Kendrick plates. Evidence no less than B.H. roberts was quoting them positively. [00:31:09] Speaker B: Right. [00:31:09] Speaker C: I do also want to point out the place where we kind of first broke that these are forgery, like the first publication or like one of the major publications in the Ensign in 1981. Stanley Kimball, a church publication. So it's not this. The church is gaslighting or whatever. The church was one of the first ones to say, yeah, this looks like a forgery based on what we now know. [00:31:27] Speaker B: But I do think with the Stanley Kimball thing, it is worth noting that in addition to the confession from Fugate, and I think there's another source that I can't remember off the top of my head that actually indicates, I think the blacksmith kind of confessed to it. [00:31:40] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:31:40] Speaker B: To it. And someone in. In the town still in the 1850s or. And so within like 10 years of when it happened. But that still just didn't become widely known until after Fugate and later. Right. But in addition to those confessions, we do have like the one surviving Kinderhook plate which was subjected to testing. Testing and was confirmed to be like 19th cent century brass. And so we know that they're not authentic. But like I said, Joseph Smith doesn't appear to have fallen for it. And I think it's actually. I find it actually quite inspiring that he doesn't follow for it. I also think it's instructive. It's worth noting because sometimes people like to be like, oh look, they had witnesses and Joseph Smith had witnesses. People sometimes like to compare these two things and say, oh look, they're the same. Joseph Smith's the same. Like. No, Joseph Smith's modus operandi is completely different. Right. They never hide the Kinderhook plates. Soper and Savage never hide the Michigan relics from sight. Right. The whole point of parade them around. The whole point of making a fake artifact is to trick people, is to trick people and to parade it around and to hopefully get money. Get money, fame, whatever, fool people into believing it. And Joseph Smith doesn't do that. The fact that his witnesses, for one thing, they see an angel. Right. He's got three witnesses that see an angel. That's harder to fake. Right. But then the eight witnesses also see him. And it's the testimony of the eight witnesses and a lot of the other people around him who have interactions with the plates while covered that I think provide compelling evidence that Joseph Smith had a real artifact that was passably ancient, according to the eight witnesses statement. Right. Sometimes people are. Oh, but they're not experts. Well, okay, they're not experts, but it's still a lot of work. These guys. It took three people, including a blacksmith, to make this small set of plates. [00:33:26] Speaker C: Little, small ones that are that big, ladies and gentlemen, the small set of [00:33:29] Speaker B: plates that were passably ancient to your average citizen of Illinois, if you will, that looked like they could be authentic to them. And their witnesses are like, they have people witness them. Dig it up. Joseph went to the hill, Cumorah, by himself, Right. He doesn't have people witness him, pull him out of the ground to attest to the authenticity of them and stuff like that. He doesn't parade them around. If he went through the effort to make a fake set of plates that was passably ancient enough that the, that the eight witnesses could look at it and say it has the appearance of gold and the appearance of ancient work. And we, we hefted and handled them and we turned over as many leaves as we saw fit. That's not the exact language of the statement, but you guys can go read it, right? It's passably ancient. That's a lot of work that Joseph Smith apparently went through to then just never actually show them to like the public. Like, why? [00:34:18] Speaker C: Well, that's the thing. If you're already going to have an angel take them away at the end of it, right. Part of the silks show to as many people as you can get as many people on the record. And then, oh, the angel came and took him away. Right. But just showing them to a select few. Yeah, that seems to encounter to what most fraudsters do. [00:34:34] Speaker B: It's not. Joseph Smith's behavior is different from what we actually see as the modus operandi of people who are doing hoaxes, who are doing hoaxes and fake artifacts. Okay. That's kind of the point I want to make there. [00:34:48] Speaker A: So Joseph Smith seems to experiment a little bit with these Kinderhook plates, but at the end of the day, he never uses revelatory means, he never actually produces a full fledged translation, and he never tries to pursue actually acquiring them, and he just kind of lets them go. All of those things feel pretty compelling to me, and it feels like the work that Don Bradley and Mark Esther McGee has done is really quite impressive as far as digging down to the details of the Kinderhook plates. [00:35:12] Speaker B: So if you guys do want to [00:35:13] Speaker A: learn more, I'd highly recommend looking up their chapter in Either A Reason for Faith or Producing Ancient Scripture. Remember, you can study deeply, believe boldly. We'll see you next time.