Daniel C. Peterson (PhD, UCLA) is a professor of Islamic studies and Arabic at Brigham Young University and founder of the university’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative. He has published and spoken extensively on both Islamic and Mormon subjects. Formerly chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS) and an officer, editor, and author for its successor organization, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, his professional work as an Arabist focuses on the Qur’an and on Islamic philosophical theology. He is the author, among other things, of a biography entitled Muhammad: Prophet of God (Eerdmans, 2007).
Mr. Peterson also is President of The Interpreter Foundation which opposes the Heartland theory and promotes the Mesoamerican theory, which is fine with us. We simply want you to compare his belief about the translation of the plates with mine. Read for yourself and then decide.
BOMC and “The Interpreter Foundation”, says they agree with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in their neutral stand on Book of Mormon Geography. They also claim there are two Hill Cumorah’s, one in Mexico, and the one in NY. BOMC is not neutral as they won’t allow a dialogue or allow material on their website with any other geographical theory, including the Heartland. FIRM Foundation is not neutral on geography, but believe the Book of Mormon events began in the Heartland of North America, and there is only one Hill Cumorah in NY.
Book of Mormon Central’s Explanation of the Translation
Why Were the Plates Present During the Translation of the Book of Mormon?
Post contributed by BMC Team September 21, 2017, KnoWhy #366
“People are sometimes surprised to discover that the plates of the Book of Mormon were not regularly used during the process of its translation. 1- While translating, Joseph Smith would typically place his face into a hat to block out ambient light. 2- He would then, according to witnesses, read aloud the words which miraculously appeared in a seer stone or in the interpreters, and a scribe would record them. 3- As for the plates themselves, Emma Smith reported that they “often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen tablecloth.” 4- Other witnesses recalled that on a few occasions they were kept “in a nearby box under the bed or even hidden in the Whitmer’s barn during translation.” 5- This has caused some to wonder why the plates were necessary at all. If Joseph Smith wasn’t actively consulting them during the translation, then why were they covered with a cloth and placed in some nearby and usually visible location?” Book of Mormon Central
President Ezra Taft Benson offered this advice, “Sometimes room behind the pulpit, in our classrooms, in our Council meetings and in our church publications we hear, read or witness things that do not square with the truth. . . . Now do not let this serve as an excuse for your own wrong-doing. The Lord is letting the wheat and the tares mature before he fully purges the Church. He is also testing you to see if you will be misled. The devil is trying to deceive the very elect.” Ezra Taft Benson, “Our Immediate Responsibility” (BYU Devotional, Provo, October 25, 1996), https://speeches.byu.edu/talks/ezra-taft benson_immediateresponsibility.
In this case that Book of Mormon Central speaks about above, I believe some of the historians and scholars are being deceived or just who get it wrong. The Prophet and Brethren have hired the Historians and trust them, but in some cases I believe they have given the Brethren the wrong advice purposely or not. Also, Book of Mormon Central, FairMormon, The Interpreter, Meridian Magazine and others claim they are neutral like the Church says when it comes to geography and translation, but I believe they are not neutral but one-sided towards Mesoamerica. I am not neutral as I believe geography of the Book of Mormon occurred in the USA and the Heartland, but I don’t pretend I am neutral like many of the apologists. I also believe the Prophet Joseph never used a seer stone to translate. Why didn’t the Lord put the silly seer stone in with the gold plates? Because the Lord gave Joseph the Spectacles and the breastplate to properly translate.
I just read this article below by Daniel Peterson of The Interpreter Foundation. I thought it would be a good ideas to share with you my feelings about certain comments he has made. I will leave his words in black and my words will be in red.
Joseph, the stone and the hat: Why it all matters
Daniel Peterson, Columnist
March 27, 2015
Some critics of Joseph Smith mock the fact that part of the Book of Mormon translation process apparently involved dictating while looking at a stone that he’d placed within a hat. The reason some mock the dictation notion, is because it is wrong in my opinion. Why would Moroni and Nephi and other prophets take painstaking efforts to maintain the plates and hide them and record their lives on them, to only later have Joseph not read them or utilize them to just have someone put words on a stone? Daniel makes his own belief system a problem for those who disagree with him.)
Yet far from being damaging evidence against his claims and against the Book of Mormon, this fact may strongly support their plausibility. The Lord has said that he makes (seemingly) weak things become strong (Ether 12:27), and this seems yet another such case. (So Daniel is saying the weak things, includes reading words off of a stone and making Joseph’s efforts so easy?)
Consider a smartphone or e-reader, for instance. Their screens are very difficult to read out in the sunlight and need to be shaded. Or consider your personal computer. You probably don’t place it directly in front of a window where bright light will be streaming into your face. You need contrasting darkness so that you can see the screen without strain, and especially so if you’ll be working on it for lengthy periods. Otherwise, your eyes will tire and your head will ache. (So now we are saying that the Lord’s seer stone gave off inferior light and Joseph had to use a hat? Who made this up? Very seldom do any of us need to read our cell phones inside a hat, or to block out the sunlight. The smart users of a cell phone look at their phones in places where that darkness is not needed.)
Now consider Joseph Smith. According to those familiar with the process, he dictated the Book of Mormon from words that somehow appeared in a “seer stone” or (much the same thing) in the Urim and Thummim. (Here Daniel is referring the Emma Smith, David Whitmer and Martin Harris who claimed to have been familiar with the translation process. These three never saw the process as Joseph was commanded to not show the plates, interpreter or the spectacles to anyone). He rarely if ever actually had the plates with him; (This is silly to insinuate Joseph didn’t need the plates to translate) he couldn’t read what was on them except through revelation anyway, and he could receive revelation (via the “interpreters”) just as easily without the plates as with them. (Daniel assumes the Urim and Thummim, the Interpreters and the stone in the hat are all the same referenced object and they aren’t necessarily) (So why were the plates necessary? Perhaps, among other things, to reassure him and the witnesses who saw and testified of them — and, thus also, us — that he was dealing with something objectively real and external to himself.) (The plates were necessary because they contained the true words of Prophets that would be important to know exactly what they said, not for an object lesson).
Evidence indicates that Joseph dictated (No, Joseph Translated by the Gift and Power of God, he did not dictate) the Book of Mormon over the course of three months (or perhaps somewhat less). His scribes needed light in order to work, but it’s quite understandable that Joseph sought to reduce the fatigue (how do we know this?) of his eyes by using a hat to exclude the ambient light. (What does needing light have to do with anything. Of course the scribes needed to see and so did Joseph, but they didn’t need to block out light using a hat).
The implications of this, however, are intriguing. A manuscript hidden in the bottom of a hat would be difficult if not impossible to read. (This is correct, but translation didn’t happen this way. Joseph used his memory bank of prior knowledge with the help of seeing images, visions and words in the spectacles as he looked at the characters on the plates, and then in his own words told his scribe what he saw, read or heard). Yet Joseph dictated the Book of Mormon — roughly 270,000 words — in somewhere between 60 and 90 days. That’s approximately 3,000 to 4,500 words each and every day, without rewrites or significant revisions. (Practiced writers will instantly recognize this as a stunning pace.) Or, to put it another way, this young man, with only about two months of schooling, dictated (Not dictated but translated) roughly six to nine pages of today’s printed English edition every single day for two or three months.
Had he memorized it? That seems unlikely.
Was he creating it on the spot? That would have been an astonishing achievement. And the evidence seems against it. (If Joseph was just reading words off of a stone, he could have read words off of a piece of wood, or any object in a hat. A critical issue is, there were only three things contained in the stone box where the plates lay, the breastplate and the two stones fastened to a silver bow fastened to that breastplate. This is all Joseph needed to translate. He didn’t need a hat and a stone that he had he found earlier in a well, to dictate).
For example, he himself was sometimes surprised by what he read. He couldn’t pronounce many of the proper names, for example, and had to spell them out. He worried when he read about the walls of Jerusalem; he’d never seen a town surrounded by walls, and he needed his wife’s reassurance that this was true (see “David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness,” Lyndon W. Cook, Grandin Book Company, 1991). (Isn’t it just as possible that Joseph had trouble understanding certain images or explaining in his own memory bank of words, what he was seeing or trying to say from his mind or from the plates how to describe things)?
When he came to a break in the text, he had his scribe write “chapter.” This happened throughout the book of 1 Nephi, for example, and it also occurred at the end of that book. But then, when they realized that they’d now reached a break between two independent books, they crossed out the word “chapter” and replaced it with “The Book of Nephi,” marking the opening of 2 Nephi (see “The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text,” edited by Royal Skousen, FARMS, 2001; and Skousen’s “Translating the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript,” in “Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins,” edited by Noel B. Reynolds, FARMS, 1997).
It appears, thus, that Joseph was dictating from an unfamiliar text. (I believe Joseph was translating not dictating. If he was dictating, the words he read came from some other source and not the plates. Were they the words of Nephi, Christ, an angel, or one of the three Nephites? It could be anyone and not the prophets who kept the records all these years). It also seems likely that what he was reading provided its own independent light source, such that he could read it even with ordinary light excluded, in what one historian famously called “a world lit only by fire.” That sounds very much like the translation method described by the Prophet and other witnesses to the translation, but it’s difficult to reconcile with the theories that critics typically offer. (If the words Joseph was reading had their own “independent light source” as Daniel said, why did Joseph need to block out other light or have a hard time reading anything on the stone)?
For more detailed treatment of the relevant issues, see “What the Manuscripts and the Eyewitnesses Tell Us about the Translation of the Book of Mormon” (published in 2002).
Daniel Peterson teaches Arabic studies, founded BYU’s Middle Eastern Texts Initiative, directs MormonScholarsTestify.org, chairs mormoninterpreter.com, blogs daily at patheos.com/blogs/danpeterson, and speaks only for himself.
Rod Meldrum
“Foundational to the Restoration is the validity of the translation of the Book of Mormon. The primary editors, Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdrey, maintained that the process was accomplished using an instrument provided centuries in advance by the Lord for the very purpose of sacred inspired translation. Some detractors claimed that Joseph abandoned the Lord’s instrument, the Urim and Thummim, for a more convenient stone in a hat. The Lord Himself in several revelations validated Joseph’s use of this instrument. Yet modern historians point to hostile witnesses to bolster their stone in the hat (SITH) narrative. Rian explores important new insights into this critical aspect of Church History.”
R o d M e l d r u m T h e F I R M F o u n d a t i o n
Special Articles of the Translation- Shirt, Hat, Linen
If a stone had words appear, that means someone (Angel, Christ, Nephite or who?) is having Joseph dictate, not translate. That would mean Joseph only read what he was told. That is not translation. David Whitmer, who was never a transcriber and one who never saw Joseph’s actual translation, said a piece of parchment would appear with words that would appear. Many intellectuals also say Joseph never looked at the plates while translating. Then why did Nephi and Mormon keep and protect the records? It doesn’t make sense. I believe Joseph really TRANSLATED an unknown language to English.
The hat was nothing more than a prop to block out Emma’s vision so Joseph could keep his promise to not show the breastplate (under his shirt), or the spectacles hidden from view and not in the hat; and the plates lay partially covered as Emma could not see them at all from her angle. Yes, the Prophet of the Lord kept his promise not to show anyone these articles the best way he knew how with his shirt, the hat, and the linen; these became special articles of the translation and a special part of the” gift and power of God”. How marvelous are these spectacles as I can see “everything” as Joseph said to Josiah Stowell as written by Lucy and written by her transcribers, Brother, and Sister Coray. I know the title of the art for me is, “Mother”, I have got the Key” and as Lucy continued to say, “Joseph seems to like the glasses far more than the plates.” Joseph said, Mother, I can see anything! This Key (Spectacles) unlocked the Heart (Breastplate) so Joseph by the “Gift and Power of God”, could translate this special book for a witness to the world. How I love the Book of Mormon, another witness of Jesus Christ.
Lucy Mack Smith about the KEY
“Lucy Mack Smith said, “I trembled so much with fear lest all might be lost again by some small failure in keeping the commandments, that I was under the necessity of leaving the room to conceal my feelings Lucy. Joseph saw this and followed me. “Mother,” said he. “Do not be uneasy. All is right. See here,” said he, “I have got the key.”
I knew not what he meant, but took the article in my hands and, examining it with no covering but a silk handkerchief, found that it consisted of two smooth three-cornered diamonds set in glass, and the glasses were set in silver bows connected with each other in much the same way that old-fashioned spectacles are made. He took them again and left me, but did not tell me anything of the record….
That of which I spoke, which Joseph termed a key, was indeed nothing more nor less than a Urim and Thummim by which the angel manifested those things to him that were shown him in vision; by which also he could at any time ascertain the approach of danger, either to himself or the record, and for this cause he kept these things constantly about his person.” (History of Joseph Smith, Revised and Enhanced, p. 139, 145)
To better understand what my feelings are about the method of translation you can read my short PDF here, or several of my blogs here and here, or you can purchase my new Book titled “These Stones, Fastened to a Breastplate” JSH 1:35 at our bookstore here.
ALL Items in the Stone Box at Cumorah!
