Church History

The Book of Mormon Witnesses — What They Actually Claimed

The CES Letter presses four charges against the eleven witnesses: they held a “folk-magic” worldview; they saw the plates with “spiritual eyes,” not natural sight; the three original witnesses were all excommunicated; and most were related to Joseph Smith by blood or marriage. Each charge is real — and each one collapses the moment you read the whole record instead of a single sentence pulled from it.

The CES Letter’s Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument (summarized)

Across its witness section, the CES Letter presses four points: the witnesses shared a “magic worldview”; Martin Harris said he saw the plates with the “eye of faith” or “spiritual eyes,” so the testimony was visionary rather than literal; all three of the original witnesses were eventually excommunicated; and most of the witnesses were related to Joseph Smith by blood or marriage.

These are four separate arguments stacked to create one impression: that the witnesses were credulous, biased insiders who never saw anything solid. To answer honestly, we take each claim at its strongest — the version a careful skeptic would actually build.

Two Ways to Read the Record

There are two ways to read the witness record, and the CES Letter follows the simpler one.

The simpler reading: collapse two very different events into one. Treat the word “spiritual” as a synonym for “imaginary.” Lean on the single most hostile second-hand paraphrase in the entire archive — a disaffected man’s 1838 letter — as though it carried the weight of the witnesses’ own words. And leave the reader to assume that “excommunicated” and “related” mean “discredited.”

The fuller reading: the historian’s. Distinguish the Three Witnesses (an angelic manifestation, always openly described as such) from the Eight (an ordinary daylight handling, no angel, no vision). Read “spiritual eyes” in the biblical idiom the witnesses actually spoke. Weigh the hundreds of statements the eleven gave across sixty years against one paraphrase written in the heat of a schism. And ask the only question a fraud hypothesis must survive: why did not one of them ever take it back, when every one had the motive and the opportunity, and three had a bitter grievance that made recanting the obvious move? The fuller reading is not an apologetic dodge — it is simply what the surviving documents say when you read all of them. Here is where each reading leads.

Two Events, Not One — The Distinction Jeremy Erases

The single most important fact the CES Letter blurs is that there were two witness experiences, of two entirely different kinds. The Three Witnesses — Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris — described a manifestation in which an angel showed them the plates. Their published testimony says so plainly: “an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates.” No faithful Latter-day Saint has ever hidden this. The Three Witnesses’ experience was, by their own account, a heavenly ministration. Calling it “visionary” is not a gotcha; it is a paraphrase of the testimony itself.

The Eight Witnesses — four Whitmers, Hiram Page, and three members of the Smith family — described something completely different: no angel, no cloud, no vision. Just Joseph handing them a stack of metal leaves in ordinary daylight. Their testimony is deliberately mundane: “Joseph Smith… has shown unto us the plates… and we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work… we have seen and hefted.” Seen and hefted. You do not heft a hallucination.

This is the load-bearing distinction. Every “spiritual eyes” quote comes from the Three; Jeremy then quietly lets that language contaminate the Eight, whose testimony contains no spiritual language at all. Separate the two events — as any historian must — and half his case has nothing to attach to.

The Strongest Form of the Objection: The Burnett Letter

Let us not fight a weak version. The strongest single piece of evidence Jeremy can marshal is a letter written by Stephen Burnett to Lyman Johnson on April 15, 1838, at the height of the Kirtland apostasy. Burnett reports hearing Martin Harris say in a public meeting that he “never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination, neither Oliver nor David,” and that even the Eight Witnesses “never saw them.” If that sentence stood alone, it would be devastating. So let us give it every ounce of its weight — and then read the next line of the very same letter.

Burnett continues: after others had spoken, “M Harris arose & said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon for he knew it was true, he said he had hefted the plates repeatedly in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them, but he never saw them only as he saw a city through a mountain.” In the space of one paragraph, in a hostile witness’s own hand, Martin Harris both used the “vision” language and testified that he had physically hefted the plates and knew the book was true. The document Jeremy needs to sink the witnesses is the same document that shows Harris affirming them. It is worth being precise about what Harris’s heft does and does not prove: the box was covered, so his testimony here establishes the plates’ solid weight, not the sight of their uncovered engravings. That is exactly why the physical core of the witness case does not rest on Harris. It rests on the Eight, who handled the uncovered leaves in daylight and saw the engravings with their natural eyes — the plainest, least ambiguous testimony in the record, and the one to which the argument now turns.

Two further facts finish the point. First, the word “imagination” — the most damaging word in the quotation — is almost certainly not Harris’s. The critical historian Dan Vogel, no friend of the Church, judges that the reference to “imagination” is “likely that of Burnett” rather than Harris — that is, an embellishment introduced by the reporter, not the witness. When even the skeptic’s own leading source attributes the word to Burnett, you are no longer looking at Harris’s testimony; you are looking at Burnett’s spin on it. Second, Burnett’s claim that the Eight “never saw” the plates is flatly contradicted by the Eight themselves — repeatedly, for decades, and often from outside the Church.

The Eight Witnesses, Under Oath of Their Own Disaffection

The cleanest test of a witness is what he says when he has turned against the man he witnessed for. John Whitmer left the Church and never returned, living forty more years in Missouri estranged from the Saints. One 1839 account comes to us at a remove — Thomas Bullock’s copy of a memorandum kept by the Church agent Theodore Turley — and so it should be weighed as report rather than as Whitmer’s own signed words. In it, Whitmer, doubting even whether the book was true, is recorded as saying: “I now say, I handled those plates; there were fine engravings on both sides… and they were shown to me by a supernatural power.” That last clause is worth pausing on, because a careful reader will seize it: does “supernatural power” turn the Eight’s handling into a vision after all? It does not. Whitmer is describing how the plates were brought to the witnesses — a providential circumstance — not the manner in which he touched them; in the same breath he insists on the ordinary, tactile fact of the engravings under his hands. And crucially, this is not the only or the best record of John Whitmer’s witness. He affirmed the plates by his own hand in the Eight Witnesses’ published testimony, and repeated the claim of handling them, in his own signed statements, to the end of his life.

Read that carefully: a man willing to say out loud that he no longer knew whether the Book of Mormon was true was still not willing to say he had not handled the plates. That is the fingerprint of a real memory — a conspirator drops the whole story when he drops the faith. John Whitmer dropped the faith and kept the plates, as did Hiram Page, who affirmed in an 1847 letter that he had handled them. The Eight are precisely the witnesses Burnett said had “never seen” the plates — and precisely the ones whose first-hand words, given while disaffected, prove Burnett wrong.

“Spiritual Eyes” in Its Own Century

The whole force of the “spiritual eyes” argument depends on a modern reader hearing “spiritual” and thinking “not real.” But that is not how the witnesses’ Bible used the word, and it is not how they used it. In scripture, spiritual sight is the faculty that lets a person perceive things that are objectively, physically present but hidden from ordinary view. When Elisha’s servant panicked at a surrounding army, the prophet prayed and “the LORD opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire” (2 Kings 6:17). The chariots were there. The servant’s natural eyes simply had not yet been opened to them.

Paul draws the same line: “the natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God… because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Corinthians 2:14). For a Bible-soaked New Yorker in 1829, “I saw it with my spiritual eyes” did not mean “I made it up” — it meant “God opened my eyes to something genuinely there.” Jeremy translates a nineteenth-century faith idiom into a twenty-first-century word for delusion, and rests an argument on the mistranslation.

The “Folk-Magic Worldview” Charge

The CES Letter argues that men who believed in second sight, seer stones, and treasure guarded by spirits were too credulous to be trusted about metal plates. Two things need saying, and the faithful reader should say both without flinching.

First, the premise is historically fair: seer stones and “cunning folk” practices ran through the popular Christianity of early-1800s New England, and some witnesses shared that culture. This is context to understand, not an embarrassment to hide. The Bible itself sanctifies physical instruments of revelation — the Urim and Thummim in the high priest’s breastplate (Exodus 28:30). A worldview in which God speaks through objects is not primitive superstition; it is the world of the patriarchs. The Lord met these men inside the culture they actually inhabited — an inspired accommodation, not a defect.

Second, and decisively: a folk-magic worldview does not disable the sense of touch. Whatever David Whitmer believed about second sight, he did not need mystical faculties to feel the weight of a fifty-pound stack of metal or hear the leaves ring. The Eight Witnesses’ claim is not a subtle spiritual impression that a credulous mind might manufacture; it is a claim about heft, edges, and engraved surfaces in daylight. Credulity can invent an angel. It cannot invent the muscle memory of lifting something heavy.

“All Three Were Excommunicated” — The Argument That Runs Backward

It is true: Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris were all separated from the Church in 1837–1838. The CES Letter offers this as evidence against them — but the logic reverses on inspection. These were the men with the maximum motive to recant: estranged, angry, publicly humiliated. A single sentence, “I never really saw the plates,” would have rehabilitated each of them overnight before a scoffing public and settled every score they had with the prophet. The door was wide open. Not one of the eleven walked through it.

Instead they doubled down against their own interest. Oliver Cowdery, after his years away, was rebaptized in 1848 and stood in a Council Bluffs meeting to reaffirm that he had held the interpreters and seen the angel. David Whitmer, who stayed outside the Church until his death in 1888 and had every reason to bury the story, instead published an Address to All Believers in Christ that criticizes the Church at length while insisting, in the same breath, that his testimony of the plates and the angel was true. Martin Harris, after decades of religious wandering, crossed the plains as an old man in 1870 to rejoin the Saints and testify again. The full record of their reaffirmations runs to hundreds of statements over sixty years. The excommunications did not silence the witnesses. They created the exact conditions under which a fabricator confesses — and the witnesses still would not confess, because there was nothing to confess.

The contrast with James Strang’s witnesses to the Voree plates is the tell. Several of Strang’s signatories did later renounce their statements once the social pressure lifted — which is precisely the behavior a fraud predicts. The Book of Mormon witnesses did the opposite under far greater pressure. The Strang comparison, offered as a parallel, is actually the control group that isolates what makes the Book of Mormon witnesses extraordinary.

“Most Were Related” — True, and Beside the Point

Yes, the witness lists cluster around two families, the Whitmers and the Smiths. This is what real founding events look like: extraordinary things are witnessed by whoever is in the room, and the people around any new movement are its early, close-knit community. The first witnesses of the resurrection were a tight circle of friends and kin; that has never been treated as grounds to dismiss them.

But the specific claim — related to Joseph Smith “by blood or marriage” — also quietly overreaches. Martin Harris, the very witness whose “spiritual eyes” language anchors the CES Letter’s case, was no relation to Joseph Smith at all. He was a prosperous, respected Palmyra farmer who mortgaged his own farm to finance the printing — a man with property, reputation, and no family stake, who put all three on the line. His independence is the reason his testimony matters so much, and the reason the “they were all just relatives” frame breaks on the first case you examine. (For Harris’s financial sacrifice and the printing, see the companion study Martin Harris and the Book of Mormon Printing.)

There is a stronger form of the “interested witness” charge that deserves a direct answer. One might grant that Harris was no relative and still argue that his very sacrifice gave him a motive never to recant: a man who has mortgaged his farm on a book has every reason to keep insisting the book is true, if only to justify the loss. Sunk cost, on this reading, predicts stubbornness just as well as kinship would. The objection is fair, and the record answers it in an unusual way. Sunk cost binds a man to the investment — the Church, the movement, the community he paid into. But Harris walked away from all of that: he was estranged from the Church for more than three decades and drifted through several rival movements, repeatedly abandoning the institutional stake his farm had bought. What he would not abandon, through every one of those breaks, was the far narrower factual claim that he had handled and been shown the plates. A sunk-cost motive should have decayed the moment he stopped defending the enterprise; instead the enterprise fell away and the testimony remained. That is the pattern of a man reporting a fact he cannot un-know, not one protecting a bad investment.

But the Seer Stone Made the Plates Unnecessary?

A related move argues that because Joseph often translated by looking into a seer stone in a hat rather than at the open plates, the plates were dead weight, so the witnesses are beside the point. But how the translation happened and whether the plates existed are separate questions. The witnesses did not testify about mechanics; they testified that a heavy, engraved metal object existed and that they handled it. That the plates served more as a divine anchor than a reading surface does not make eleven men’s hands close on empty air. For the method itself, see The Book of Mormon Translation Method.

Verdict

The core of the CES Letter’s case does not survive contact with the full record. “Spiritual eyes” is a nineteenth-century idiom for God-enabled perception of something real, not a confession of fantasy. The Burnett letter — the strongest ammunition available — contains Harris’s own reaffirmation two sentences later, and its most damning word is, by a hostile scholar’s own admission, an embellishment. The Eight described no vision at all, only daylight handling, and reaffirmed it while estranged from the Church. The excommunication argument runs backward: it hands the witnesses every incentive to recant, and their refusal is their strongest evidence. The “all related” frame breaks on Martin Harris, an unrelated outsider who risked his fortune. On every count, the nuanced reading is not merely defensible — it is better documented than Jeremy’s.

Genuinely (and mildly) open. We cannot reconstruct the exact phenomenology of the Three Witnesses’ angelic experience; sincere people can still ask what it is like to see “with spiritual eyes,” and the sources describe rather than explain it. The precise texture of the witnesses’ folk-religious assumptions is a live topic for historians. But these are questions about the nature of the experience, not about whether eleven men, several of them hostile, spent their lives insisting they had handled and seen the plates. That fact is as solid as anything in early American religious history — and it is the fact the fraud hypothesis was built to erase.

Further Study