Book of Mormon — Translation

The Book of Mormon Translation Method

Joseph Smith translated much of the Book of Mormon with a seer stone placed in a hat. The Church has taught this openly for more than a century — in its own magazines and published histories — and released photographs of the stone itself in 2015. The CES Letter treats the fact as a bombshell. It is not. And the way the Letter builds its case — by shortening a quotation, flattening a culture, and ignoring a record the Church had been printing for generations — is where Jeremy Runnells chose the weaker path.

What the CES Letter Claims

CES Letter

Joseph used the same “magic” peep stone he used treasure-hunting — placing it in a hat and burying his face in it. The gold plates “were not used” for the Book of Mormon we have today. Ward bulletin boards and manuals still show Joseph studying the plates, so members were deceived. Even Richard Bushman asks, “What in the world are the plates for?” And even some BYU religion professors have called the hat method fictitious.

Read quickly, this feels like an exposé. Read carefully, every one of these points has a nuanced, better-documented answer that was available to Jeremy when he wrote — and that he passed over in favor of the shortest, most damaging version. Let us take them in turn, and then name the pattern.

The Church Published This Openly — For Over a Century

The charge of institutional deception collapses on the timeline. The seer stone and the hat were never a Church secret waiting to be exposed. They had been discussed in the Church’s own Ensign magazine, in the Improvement Era, in B. H. Roberts’s Comprehensive History of the Church, and in Latter-day Saint scholarship for over a century before Jeremy Runnells wrote a word. In December 2013 the Church gathered those long-public details into a plain-language Gospel Topics essay, “Book of Mormon Translation,” which openly describes the stone, the hat, and the eyewitnesses to the process; in 2015 it published photographs of Joseph’s actual brown seer stone alongside the printer’s manuscript. The information was old. Only the convenience of a single, accessible summary was new.

So the honest framing is not “the Church hid this and Jeremy exposed it.” The honest framing is “the details of the translation were known to historians for over a century, most members simply had not read the details, and in 2013 the Church put them in a plain-language essay for everyone.” A devotional painting on a meetinghouse wall is not a doctrinal claim about physics; it is art simplified for reverence, the way a Nativity scene compresses months of narrative into one stable. Devotional art lagging behind archival detail is not a cover-up. Treating it as one is the first place the Letter reaches for the darker reading when a fairer one is right there.

“The Same Magic Peep Stone” — Context the Letter Deletes

The Letter’s rhetorical engine is the word “same.” Joseph used a stone in searching for lost objects; Joseph used a stone in translating; therefore translation is just more treasure-digging. But sameness of object is not sameness of meaning. A man may use his hands to dig a well and to bless his child; the hands are the same, the acts are not.

In early-1800s rural New York, the line between “religion” and “folk practice” that feels obvious to a modern reader simply had not been drawn yet. Bibles were used as divining instruments; seer stones were common household objects; educated and devout people alike believed the material world could carry spiritual perception. Joseph’s early experience with a stone was part of that ordinary world — and, in the Restoration’s own telling, it was the schooling ground where a farm boy learned to distinguish the voice of God from his own imagination before he was trusted with a sacred record. God routinely meets people inside their culture and lifts them from it; that is the pattern of scripture, not an exception to it. Reducing all of that to “a magic Ouija board” is the decontextualized version. The historically grounded version is laid out in the discussion of Joseph Smith and the folk culture of his day, and it is both more accurate and more interesting than the caricature.

Instruments of Revelation Are Scriptural, Not Strange

Scripture repeatedly shows God giving physical instruments to help prophets receive revelation. The Book of Mormon calls them “interpreters” (Mosiah 8:13); the Old Testament high priest carried the Urim and Thummim on his breastplate; the early apostles cast lots to choose Matthias. Revelation itself, D&C 9:8–9 teaches, is a matter of studying it out and feeling the confirmation in mind and heart — a spiritual process, never a mechanical readout. A seer stone is one more consecrated instrument in a very long biblical line.

The buried assumption in the CES Letter is that “real” translation means a scholar bent over a manuscript, moving word by word with lexicon in hand. That is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century academic ideal projected backward onto a prophetic gift. God has never bound Himself to modern documentary procedure. The Latter-day Saint doctrine of translation as revelation rather than philology was on the table the whole time; the Letter simply declines to engage it.

Emma Smith’s Eyewitness Testimony

The single most valuable witness to the process is Emma Smith, Joseph’s wife and earliest scribe. In an 1879 interview published in the Saints’ Herald — given as a member of the Reorganized Church, not the Utah Church, and with no institutional loyalty to defend — she described what she saw with her own eyes:

Emma Smith, 1879

“The plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen tablecloth… I once felt of the plates, as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb… Joseph, when at work, would sit with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour with nothing between us; he had neither manuscript nor book to read from… if he did not know how to spell a word, he would ask me how to spell it, then proceed… When he resumed after meals, or after interruptions, he would begin where he had left off, without any hesitation.”

Notice what Emma volunteers without being asked: no manuscript, no notes, no reference books, no hesitation, and seamless resumption across days — and the physical plates lying under a cloth on the same table where she worked. Her account simultaneously confirms the hat-and-stone method the CES Letter treats as scandalous and the physical reality of the plates the CES Letter says were “not used.” Both were true at once. The Letter quotes the first half of that reality and buries the second.

“What in the World Are the Plates For?” — Bushman, Quoted Half-Way

This is the clearest example of the weaker path, because it involves a real quotation deployed against its own author. Richard Bushman — a Columbia University historian and a committed, believing Latter-day Saint — does pose the question rhetorically: if Joseph read from a stone rather than from the plates, what were the plates for? But Bushman asks it in order to answer it. He does not conclude the plates are pointless; he concludes that they anchor the record in history and in physical evidence. The CES Letter lifts the question and drops the answer, leaving readers with a believing scholar’s set-up shorn of his resolution — as if Bushman were confessing doubt when he was actually teaching.

And the answer Bushman gives is compelling. The plates did real work that no stone could do:

  • They made the record historical, not visionary. A tangible ancient artifact separates the Book of Mormon from a purely inward mystical experience. Something real existed in time and space, and men lifted it and felt its heft. The weight and metallic composition of the plates is itself a datum the witnesses reported consistently.
  • They anchored the witnesses. Eleven men handled, hefted, and examined the plates; several described the engravings. Not one of the Three or Eight Witnesses ever retracted his testimony, including those who left the Church in bitterness. You cannot heft a metaphor.
  • They generated external evidence. Characters copied from the plates traveled to New York, producing the Charles Anthon episode — a documented event that is difficult to explain unless there were real characters on a physical source to copy from.
  • They were part of the covenant. Moroni delivered them under conditions; their guardianship was a stewardship, not a study aid. The instrument that accessed the text and the artifact that certified its reality were never meant to be the same object.

The fuller treatment of exactly this question — why the gold plates were needed at all — shows that Bushman’s question has a rich answer. The CES Letter presents the question as though it had none.

“Even BYU Professors Called It Fictitious”

This objection quietly works against the Letter. If, in earlier decades, some faithful teachers assumed the stone-in-hat accounts were exaggerations and pictured Joseph reading the plates directly, that tells us the older devotional image was sincerely held — not cynically manufactured to deceive. People do not deceive with an image they themselves believe. As the primary sources were compiled and made accessible, Latter-day Saint scholarship followed the evidence to the seer-stone account, and the Church made that account the official, illustrated, plain-language teaching in the Gospel Topics essay and in the Saints narrative history. That is a tradition refining its picture in the direction of the documents — the exact opposite of a conspiracy. The Letter offers it as proof of deception; it is actually proof of good faith.

“But the Same Method Produced the Book of Abraham”

The strongest form of the objection is not about the hat at all. It runs: the same seer gift later produced the Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyri that many Egyptologists read as ordinary funerary texts, and once produced a brief rendering connected to the forged Kinderhook plates — so how can the instrument be trusted? That is a fair question, and it deserves a full answer rather than a footnote. It gets one. The recovered papyri, the missing-scroll and catalyst accounts of that translation, and what the Egyptologists actually establish are treated in The Papyri — What the Egyptologists Actually Say; Joseph’s actual, limited words about Kinderhook — nothing like the confident full “translation” the story imagines — are examined in The Kinderhook Plates — What Joseph Smith Actually Said. The short version: neither episode shows the method failing to do what the Book of Mormon’s own witnesses, internal complexity, and Hebraic structure independently establish it did. An instrument is judged by its product — and the Book of Mormon is a product the CES Letter never sits down and seriously weighs.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

At every point in this section of the CES Letter, two roads were open, and Jeremy Runnells could see both. On this issue he consistently took the lesser one:

  • On disclosure: the fair road was “the details have sat in the Church’s own Ensign, the Improvement Era, and B. H. Roberts’s published history for over a century.” He took the road of “members were deceived” — a claim the century-long public record refutes.
  • On the seer stone: the accurate road was the folk culture of 1820s New York, where sacred and material perception were not yet divided. He took the road of “a magic peep stone, same as treasure-digging.”
  • On Bushman: the honest road was to quote the historian’s question and his answer. He took the road of quoting only the question, turning a believing scholar into an unwitting witness for doubt.
  • On the plates: the informed road was “the instrument accessed the text; the plates grounded it in history and witnesses.” He took the road of “the plates were pointless.”

None of these were hidden roads. The essay, the Emma interview, Bushman’s own books, and the historical scholarship on folk culture were all in print and reachable. The nuanced answer is not a modern patch invented to survive the CES Letter; it is the older, better-sourced account that the Letter had to compress and truncate in order to feel decisive. When the fully documented version is the one you have to shrink to make your point, you are standing at the fork and choosing the weaker path.

Verdict

On the facts, this is settled, and mostly in the Church’s favor. Resolved: Joseph did dictate much of the text with a seer stone in a hat; the Church has taught this openly for over a century and published photographs of the stone in 2015; the physical plates were real, were handled by witnesses, and served purposes a stone could not; and Bushman’s famous question has a strong answer that he himself points toward. The deception narrative does not survive its own timeline.

What remains genuinely open is mild and interesting rather than threatening: historians still discuss the precise mechanics — whether words appeared on the stone, how tightly the dictation was controlled, and how the Urim and Thummim and the seer stone were used at different stages. Faithful scholars hold a range of views on those details, and the Restoration loses nothing whichever way they resolve. The one question that actually matters — is the Book of Mormon what it claims to be? — is untouched by the choice of instrument. A God who spoke through burning bushes and still, small voices can speak through a stone. The method was never the message, and on this issue the honest, contextual reading is both the more faithful one and the better-supported one.

Further Study