Church History

The Kinderhook Plates — The Trap That Sprang the Wrong Way

The Kinderhook plates were a forgery — on that everyone agrees, and the Church itself said so in print in 1981. The real question is what Joseph Smith actually did with them. The documentary record answers that question with unusual precision, and the answer is the opposite of what the CES Letter needs it to be.

What the CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument (quoting History of the Church, 5:372)

“I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt.”

On that quotation the CES Letter builds a sharp inference: if Joseph confidently “translated” what turned out to be a modern forgery, then his ability to tell an authentic ancient record from a fake is in doubt — and with it, so is the trustworthiness of his Book of Mormon translation. This is a serious-sounding argument, and it deserves a serious answer — not a dodge. The plates were indeed a fraud. Three Kinderhook, Illinois men — Wilbur Fugate, Robert Wiley, and Bridge Whitton — etched six bell-shaped brass plates with acid, aged them, and salted them into a burial mound in April 1843 specifically to bait the Mormon prophet. Fugate confessed the whole scheme in an 1879 letter, and a surviving plate held by the Chicago History Museum was analyzed in 1980, confirming acid-etched 19th-century brass. None of that is in dispute here.

The entire weight of the objection rests on one word: translate. The CES Letter needs that word to mean what it means everywhere else in Joseph Smith’s story — the gift of God, the seer stone, the Urim and Thummim, revelation. And that is exactly the reading the historical evidence does not support.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

By the time the CES Letter appeared in 2013, the documentary evidence needed to answer the Kinderhook question the careful way was already public — and Jeremy Runnells engaged it. He weighed the “he looked it up” explanation and set it aside in favor of the simpler, more damaging reading. That is the fork, and it is worth walking through why the reading he kept is the weaker one.

The simplistic path: Assume “translated a portion” means Joseph exercised the same revelatory gift he used on the gold plates — that God’s power confidently produced sacred content out of a modern forgery. On that reading, the prophet’s spiritual instrument malfunctioned, and if it malfunctioned once it cannot be trusted anywhere, Book of Mormon included.

The nuanced, historically-grounded path: Ask how Joseph produced those specific words — and then check the surviving documents to see whether he used revelation at all. When historians did exactly that, they found that the “descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh” phrase was not received by the gift of God. It was looked up. Joseph matched one character on the plates to a symbol in a manuscript sitting on his own desk — the Egyptian-language project connected to the Book of Abraham — and read off the definition already written there. This was a scholar’s guess with a reference book, not a prophet’s revelation.

The nuanced path is better supported because it is the only one that explains the actual data — the exact wording, the single character, the source document, and the total silence of every revelatory marker. The simplistic path has to assume the one thing the record never says: that Joseph called on God to read the plates. He did not.

The One Sentence Everything Rests On

Strip the story to its documentary core and you are left with a single contemporary sentence, from the diary of Joseph’s clerk William Clayton, dated May 1, 1843:

William Clayton Diary, May 1, 1843

“I have seen 6 brass plates … President J. has translated a 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.”

Notice what this is and is not. It is secondhand — Clayton reports what Joseph “says,” not something Clayton watched being revealed. It is private — a diary line, never a sermon, proclamation, revelation, or published text. And it is the only firsthand-era source. The often-quoted first-person version (“I have translated a portion…”) that appears in the History of the Church is not an independent statement by Joseph at all; the Joseph Smith Papers editors and historians Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee have shown it was rewritten into Joseph’s voice by later scribes drawing on this very Clayton entry. There are not two witnesses. There is one, and he is quoting a casual remark.

A prophet who staked his life on the Book of Mormon before formal witnesses left behind a 588-page published volume. His entire “Kinderhook translation” is a fragment of one clerk’s diary. The CES Letter treats these as equivalent acts. They are not remotely equivalent, and the gap is the first sign that something in the simplistic reading is off.

What Bradley Actually Found

Here is the evidence that reframes the whole controversy — and it was public before the CES Letter was ever written. Don Bradley laid it out at the August 2011 FAIR Conference in a presentation titled “President Joseph Has Translated a Portion,” more than a year and a half before the CES Letter appeared in April 2013; he and Mark Ashurst-McGee later published the fuller treatment in A Reason for Faith (2016). Runnells was aware of this “secular translation” explanation and, in his rebuttals, rejected it — so the point is not that he never saw the argument. He rejects it for a specific reason, one worth stating plainly and answering directly, which we do just below. First, though, Bradley traced where the phrase “a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh” came from.

One of the most prominent Kinderhook characters is a boat-shaped figure. Bradley found that this figure, broken into its parts, matches a character in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (the “GAEL”) — a manuscript Joseph and his associates had produced around 1835 as part of the Book of Abraham Egyptian project. And the definition the GAEL already assigns to that character is, in substance, exactly what Clayton recorded: a lineage tied to Ham, Pharaoh, and Egyptian kingship.

In other words, Joseph did not receive the Kinderhook “translation.” He looked up a single character in a grammar book he already owned and read out the definition beside it. That is why the content maps so neatly onto his existing Egyptian framework — the same conceptual world found in the Book of Abraham, where Pharaoh is described as “a descendant from the loins of Ham” (Abraham 1:21–27). He was not decoding the fraud; he was pattern-matching one squiggle to his own reference material. This explanation is now widely accepted among faithful historians of Mormonism precisely because it accounts for the data no other theory explains.

Runnells’ Real Counter — and Why It Backfires Too

Here is the objection stated at full strength, the way Runnells actually presses it. His complaint against the “he looked it up” explanation is not that the character-match is invented — it is that the explanation backfires. If Joseph reached for the GAEL as a working key to render a real character, treating his own Egyptian grammar as a genuine translation tool, then he plainly regarded that grammar as authentic Egyptian. And if the GAEL was authentic in his eyes, the argument runs, that only deepens the problem for the Book of Abraham, whose critics say the very same grammar is fabricated pseudo-Egyptian. On this reading, rescuing Kinderhook simply hands the ammunition to the next controversy over: to save the prophet from a forged plate, the apologist has to admit he trusted a homemade grammar that Egyptologists call nonsense.

The counter is a genuine one, and it deserves a genuine answer rather than a wave. But notice first what it concedes: that at Kinderhook Joseph was consulting a reference document, not receiving revelation. That is precisely this article’s thesis. The dispute has now moved off the seer stone entirely and onto the status of a human study project — and the GAEL was a human study project. It was an attempt by Joseph and his associates to reason out an Egyptian grammar for themselves, a scholarly exercise that faithful historians have never treated as revelation, scripture, or a canonized translation. Joseph using it as a desk reference for Kinderhook shows exactly that: that he could and did work by ordinary study when no revelation was in play. It does not show that the Book of Abraham — which the faithful hold came by revelation, not by the GAEL — stands or falls with a grammar’s academic accuracy.

So the objection does not chain Kinderhook to the Book of Abraham; it chains the GAEL to the Book of Abraham, and that link is exactly the contested question answered on its own page — whether the revealed Abraham text depended on the grammar, or the grammar was a later human effort to work backward from a revelation already received. A forged brass plate cannot decide that. What Kinderhook establishes on its own is narrow and firm: when Joseph worked as a scholar with a book on his desk, he produced a scholar’s guess. That a guess of that kind went nowhere tells us what such guesses are worth — and how unlike them the revelatory work truly was.

Two Different Methods, Not One Broken Gift

This is where the objection collapses. The Book of Mormon and the Kinderhook remark were produced by two entirely different processes.

The Book of Mormon came by revelation — dictated through a seer stone and the Urim and Thummim, across many weeks, before scribes and formal witnesses, and published as scripture with the words “by the gift and power of God.” The Kinderhook remark involved no stone, no Urim and Thummim, no dictation, no invocation of God, no scribe taking revelation, and no claim of scripture. It was Joseph doing what any nineteenth-century enthusiast of ancient languages might do: consulting a homemade grammar and offering a scholarly reading of one symbol. The revelatory method of the Book of Mormon was simply not in use at Kinderhook.

So the Kinderhook episode does not show a prophetic instrument failing. It shows a man reaching for a book instead of an altar — and getting a book’s answer. That an academic guess about a forged object went nowhere, produced no scripture, and was never repeated tells us nothing whatever about the revelatory channel that produced the Book of Mormon. If anything, it draws the line between the two methods more sharply than any apologist could.

The Strongest Form of the Objection, Met Head-On

A thoughtful critic will push harder, and the honest thing is to let them. The strongest version of the argument is not “his gift misfired.” It is this: Joseph presented himself to the world as a man who reads ancient records. When a fake was placed before him, he pronounced on its content with confidence rather than saying “this is beyond me.” Doesn’t that willingness to speak — revelation or not — reveal a habit of producing authoritative-sounding content regardless of the source’s authenticity, which is precisely what we would suspect if the Book of Mormon also came from his own mind?

That is a fair challenge, and it has a clean answer. First, the record shows restraint, not overreach: Joseph rendered essentially one character and stopped. He never produced a running “translation,” never presented the plates as scripture, never canonized a word, never staged witnesses, and never mentioned them again. The forgers designed a trap expecting a dramatic revelation they could later expose. What they got was a passing scholarly remark that died in a diary. The trap sprang the wrong way.

Second, the challenge quietly assumes the two methods are the same “habit,” when the evidence is that they are not. A man consulting a grammar book and a prophet dictating scripture through a seer stone are doing different things, and only one of them carries a claim of divine authority. You cannot indict the second by observing the first. To do so is to convict the revelation for a mistake the revelation was never asked to make. Joseph’s confidence about ancient things reflected the genuine nineteenth-century fascination with buried antiquity that surrounded him — an enthusiasm the forgers cynically exploited — but enthusiasm for an artifact is not the same act as receiving the word of God.

There is a striking parallel worth noting. When Martin Harris carried a transcript of Book of Mormon characters to the scholar Charles Anthon in 1828, the test was whether characters could be authenticated by ordinary learning — and the outcome fulfilled Isaiah’s words about the learned who cannot read a sealed book. The Anthon episode and the Kinderhook episode teach the same lesson from opposite directions: Joseph’s calling never rested on his scholarly command of ancient scripts. It rested on revelation. Kinderhook shows what happened when he tried the scholarly route without it — and it went nowhere, exactly as one would expect.

On the Charge of a Cover-Up

One more point, because it matters to anyone weighing candor. The Church did not hide Kinderhook until forced. In the August 1981 Ensign, historian Stanley B. Kimball published “Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax,” laying out the 1980 metallurgical findings in the Church’s own official magazine. That disclosure was in print more than three decades before the CES Letter appeared in 2013. Faithful scholarship did not merely react to the criticism — it had already told the story, forthrightly, long before.

Verdict

Resolved: The plates were a forgery — acknowledged by the Church in 1981. Joseph produced no revelation, no scripture, and no sustained translation of them. The evidence shows the famous phrase was not received by the gift of God but derived from a single character matched to Joseph’s own Egyptian grammar — a scholarly attempt, not a prophetic one. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, came through the revelatory process, before witnesses, and stands as published scripture. The two are different acts by different means, and the failure of a forged trap says nothing about the authentic gift. On this issue the CES Letter chose the reading that required knowing less — equating a diary aside with canonized scripture — when the fuller, better-documented answer was available and points the other way.

Genuinely (and only mildly) open: Because our core source is one secondhand diary line, we cannot reconstruct Joseph’s exact words or tone, or say with certainty how much of the plates he examined. The precise mechanics of the GAEL character-match, while compelling and broadly accepted, rest on historical reconstruction rather than a firsthand transcript. These are small uncertainties about details — not about the conclusion, which the documents support firmly: at Kinderhook Joseph was doing scholarship, not prophecy.

Further Study