Golden plates

[4] Smith found the plates on September 22, 1823, on a hill near his home in Manchester, New York, after the angel Moroni directed him to a buried stone box.

[14] The Community of Christ, however, accepts the Book of Mormon as scripture but no longer takes an official position on the historicity of the golden plates.

The best-known elements of the golden plates story are found in an account told by Smith in 1838 and incorporated into the official church histories of some Latter Day Saint movement denominations.

At the time, churches in the region contended so vigorously for souls that western New York later became known as the "burned-over district" because the fires of religious revivals had burned over it so often.

[21] Beginning as a youth in the early 1820s, Smith was periodically hired, for about $14 per month, as a scryer, using what were termed "seer stones" in attempts to locate lost items and buried treasure.

[25] Although Smith later rejected his youthful treasure-hunting activities as frivolous and immaterial, he never repudiated the stones themselves, denied their presumed power to find treasure, or ever relinquish the magic culture in which he was raised.

[27] Smith's first stone, apparently the same one that he used at least part of the time to translate the golden plates, was chocolate-colored and about the size of a chicken egg,[28] found in a deep well he helped dig for one of his neighbors.

[50] Smith said he then fainted because he had been awake all night, and while unconscious, the angel appeared a fourth time and chastised him for failing to tell the visions to his father.

[55] Using a stick to remove dirt from the edges of the stone cover and prying it up with a lever,[56] Smith saw the plates inside the box, together with other artifacts.

[79] Therefore, on the eve of September 22, 1827, the scheduled date for retrieving the plates, Smith dispatched his father to spy on Lawrence's house until dark.

[82] At the same time, Smith said he received a pair of large spectacles he called the Urim and Thummim or "Interpreters," with lenses consisting of two seer stones, which he showed his mother when he returned in the morning.

[83] Over the next few days, Smith took a well-digging job in nearby Macedon to earn enough money to buy a solid lockable chest in which to put the plates.

[86] When Emma heard of that, she rode a stray horse to Macedon and informed Smith,[87] who reportedly determined through his Urim and Thummim that the plates were safe.

[96] After hearing that a group of them would attempt to enter the house by force, Smith buried the chest under the hearth,[97] and the family was able to scare away the intended intruders.

[98] Fearing the chest might still be discovered, Smith hid it under the floor boards of his parents' old log home nearby that was then being used as a cooper shop.

[101] The translation took place mainly in Harmony, Pennsylvania (now Oakland Township), Emma's hometown, where Smith and his wife had moved in October 1827 with financial assistance from a prominent, though superstitious, Palmyra landowner Martin Harris.

[102] The translation occurred in two phases: the first, from December 1827 to June 1828, during which Smith transcribed some of the characters and then dictated 116 manuscript pages to Harris, which were lost.

The second phase began sporadically in early 1829 and then in earnest in April 1829 with the arrival of Oliver Cowdery, a schoolteacher who volunteered to serve as Smith's full-time scribe.

[113] The most prominent modern theory among many ex-Mormons is that Smith composed the translation in response to the provincial opinions of his time,[114] perhaps while in a magical trance-like state.

This confirms the view that the English text existed in some kind of unalterable, spiritual form rather than that someone had to think through difficult conceptual issues and idioms, always resulting in variants in any translation.

[131] In early June 1829, the unwanted attentions of locals around Harmony necessitated Smith's move to the home of David Whitmer and his parents in Fayette, New York.

[135] There, Smith is said to have placed the plates on a table near "many wagon loads" of other ancient records, and the Sword of Laban hanging on the cave wall.

For instance, although Martin Harris continued to testify to the truth of the Book of Mormon even when he was estranged from the church, at least during the early years of the movement, he "seems to have repeatedly admitted the internal, subjective nature of his visionary experience.

[150] During the second half of June 1829,[151] Smith took Harris, Oliver Cowdery and David Whitmer (known collectively as the Three Witnesses)[152] into woods in Fayette, New York, where they said they saw an angel holding the golden plates and turning the leaves.

"[175] In 1831, a Palmyra newspaper quoted David Whitmer, one of the Three Witnesses, as having said that the plates were a "whitish yellow color", with "three small rings of the same metal".

"[194] Oliver Cowdery also stated that when Smith visited the hill, he was stricken by a supernatural force because the plates were "sealed by the prayer of faith.

"[161] The account of the Eight Witnesses says they saw the plates in 1829 and handled "as many of the leaves as Smith has translated," implying that they did not examine untranslated parts, such as the sealed portion.

[206] Hugh Nibley, a Latter-day Saint scholar, said in 1957 that he believed even proof of the actual existence of the golden plates would not settle disputes about the Book of Mormon and the story of its origin.

[210] Nevertheless, many members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a denomination of Mormons who followed Brigham Young after Smith's death) refused to accept Fugate's confession and defended the Kinderhook plates as authentic and Smith's translation as legitimate until 1980, when Northwestern University materials science professor D. Lynn Johnson examined a plate still held by the Chicago Historical Society and conclusively proved it was a nineteenth-century creation.

Scholar Dan Vogel has argued that Smith may have constructed a set of plates, out of tin or similar metal, that could be hefted but could not pass visual inspection.