I’ve recently noticed an, umm, online “discussion” in which several former Latter-day Saints appear to be taking the position that there is simply no evidence for the existence of Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon plates. Saying that actual physical plates existed is, they’re saying, merely a faith position. It’s rather like asserting the existence of Bigfoot. It’s no better than circular reasoning.
I find such declarations deeply disheartening. I caught just a few minutes this past Sunday night of CNN’s “Waiting for JFK: Report from the Fringe,” on “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper.” I hope to be able to see the entire thing. It was stunning, but it disheartened me in much the same way as these confident but unargued declarations of the nonexistence of the plates do.
Let me be clear: Although I find them completely unpersuasive and even, sometimes, somewhat desperate, I can understand arguments that there were no plates or, slightly better, that there were plates but that they were modern forgeries, or something of that type. But to simply assert that no plates actually existed? And, moreover, that no evidence of their reality exists at all?
I had hoped that the stimulus to conversation provided by Witnesses, Undaunted: Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, our still not-yet-complete series of short “Insights” videos on the topic, and our still-under-construction Witnesses of the Book of Mormon website would have made it almost impossible to remain in such willful ignorance.
The blithe dismissal of evidence for the existence of the plates should have lost its already thin veneer of respectability among anti-Mormons more than four decades ago, with the publication of Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981). There’s been plenty of time for the historical facts to have sunk in.
Moreover, Professor Anderson wrote many other very important articles on the witnesses—and on other relevant topics—after the publication of Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. These are available online, including but not limited to “Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14/1 (2005): 18–31; “Personal Writings of the Book of Mormon Witnesses,” in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited: The Evidence for Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1997), 39–60; and “The Credibility of the Book of the Mormon Translators,” in Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds and Charles D. Tate (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1982), 213–37. But Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses remains, I think, the place to start on this vital subject.
Off the top of my head, I would also recommend these:
Andrew H. Hedges, “All My Endeavors to Preserve Them: Protecting the Plates in Palmyra, 22 September-December 1827”
Episode 304 of the Salt Lake Tribune’s “Mormon Land” series: “Live with eminent scholars Richard and Claudia Bushman” (A discussion of the plates commences at about the ten-minute mark.)
Kirk B. Henrichsen, “How Witnesses Described the Gold Plates”
The assertion in such writing that real, tangible plates existed isn’t a mere profession of faith or an appeal to circular reason. It appeals, rather, to eyewitness testimony and other external evidence. The stuff, in other words, of which ordinary, conventional historiography is made and upon which most historical scholarship is based. Simply that. To claim othewise is either ignorant or, I think, a willfully disingenuous pretense.
I realize, of course, that there is such a thing as invincible and militant ignorance, that you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink, that there are none so blind as those who will not see, and that even the most widely accepted, effective, and common vaccinations fail in roughly 2-10% of the cases where they’re used. But, really, there is no excuse for such freely-chosen obtuseness.
Moreover, it’s tiresome. I used to enjoy cops and robbers with my neighbors, using either squirt guns or just our fingers. By the age of about six or seven, though, I had had enough of neighbor kids who, although their shirts were completely soaked, continually insisted that “You missed me! You missed me!”
A week ago last night (Monday, 18 September), we went out to dinner at the Joy Luck Restaurant, in Sandy, with a group of neighbors and former neighbors. The food was good, but it’s especially good just to have a few minutes to visit with people that we enjoy. And then, afterwards, we attended a performance at the nearby Hale Centre Theatre of Catch Me If You Can: A Murder Mystery (not to be confused with the movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Frank Abagnale, which is completely distinct).
Last night (Monday, 25 September), our group of neighbors and friends met for dinner at Pei Wei Asian Kitchen, also in Sandy. I confess, perhaps just a bit guiltily, that I like Pei Wei. But, once again, the chief attraction for me in these gatherings are the conversations. Afterwards, we went again to the Hale Centre Theatre, where we saw a well-acted performance of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. Pure fluff, but very enjoyable fluff — although I seem, frankly, to have enjoyed it more than the other three people in our car did.
With acrobats and aerialists and a ship at sea and a large “elephant,” and the like, Around the World in 80 Days made very good use of many of the most spectacular resources in that remarkable building. I’ve said it before, but I firmly believe it to be true: The Hale Centre Theatre is one of the great treasures along the Wasatch Front. If Broadway or Los Angeles has a theater building to equal the Hale in terms of technical capacity and bells and whistles, I haven’t seen it. I realize, of course, lowbrow that I am — I’m heading here to head some of my more obsessive and comprehensively hostile critics off at the pass — that really great drama (William Shakespeare’s Othello, for instance, or the Antigone of Sophocles, or T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, or Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen) doesn’t need bells and whistles. But the Hale is an astonishing place and, for what it does, I haven’t seen its like.
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