Book of Mormon Translation
Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon "by the gift and power of God." This section is about how he did it, the physical scene, and the CES Letter treats that scene as its best joke.
So picture the table. Joseph leans over a hat with a small smooth stone at the bottom of it and speaks the words aloud for hours. A "seer stone" was a stone he believed God used to show him text; pressing his face into the hat shut out the daylight so he could read what appeared. Nothing else is in front of him: no open plates, no notebook, no rough draft, no borrowed books.
Whoever is taking it down shares that same table, usually Oliver Cowdery, at times Joseph's wife Emma, and no curtain divides the two of them. Neighbors drift in and out of the house while the work continues. Joseph pauses, picks back up, and never returns to patch a line he has already spoken.
The CES Letter presents that picture as a punchline. It labels the seer stone a "rock in a hat" and a "magic device or 'Ouija Board'" held over from Joseph's years hunting treasure, and plays the whole scene for ridicule.[1] Grant every piece of that. Joseph really did use the stone, he really did press his face into the hat, and the gold plates really did sit wrapped on the table or waiting in the next room while he spoke.
What the ridicule skips past is what such a scene forbids. A man with his face buried in a hat is reading from nothing, yet every theory that Joseph faked the book needs him eyeing something as he speaks: a text copied out, a passage memorized, a manuscript passed to him under the table. That room offers no corner to keep it in.
"Hidden until the internet found it"
The section's sharpest stroke is not the mockery but the charge of betrayal: that the Church buried the seer stone for over a century and owned up to it only when the internet forced its hand. The chapels, the seminary classes, and the magazines a member trusted get lined up so the feeling of having been lied to arrives ahead of any evidence.[1:1] Two separate complaints ride together inside that frame, and they call for two different answers.
One complaint is fair. For a long stretch the method really did go under-emphasized. The paintings on chapel walls showed Joseph studying the plates straight on, and the lessons seldom brought up a stone or a hat. A member who pieced together a mental picture from that art ended up with the wrong one, and running into the real account later genuinely rattled people.
A believer can concede all of that and lose nothing.
The second complaint claims the method was deliberately hidden, and the printed record simply will not hold the weight. As far back as September 1977, the Church's own Ensign printed the stone-in-hat description for any member to read.[2] In July 1993, that same magazine ran an eyewitness account of the method quoted in full, under the byline of Elder Russell M. Nelson, then an Apostle and later President of the Church.[3]
That is twenty years ahead of the 2013 essay the CES Letter casts as the Church's grudging admission. A thing your own magazine has already run, under an Apostle's name, is not a thing the internet can later expose.
That timeline collapses the section's closing exhibit, two BYU religion professors who in 2000 brushed the stone-in-hat account aside as
"fiction created for the purpose of demeaning Joseph Smith."[1:2]
Runnells holds them up as proof the history sat so deep that even believing professors at the Church's own university had missed it. They show the opposite. They wrote seven years after an Apostle had spelled the same account out openly in the Church's flagship magazine. No one had buried the record from them; it sat on the shelf in print, and they simply got it wrong while it was there to read.
Two instruments, one line
Most of the section's four pages press the case against the seer stone: the eyewitnesses in the room, the timeline that dismantles the "hidden until 2013" claim, the "Ouija Board" label that flattens a revelatory instrument into a parlor toy, and what a face-in-a-hat method physically allows.
The quieter move sets the Urim and Thummim against the seer stone as the respectable instrument beside the embarrassing one. But the Urim and Thummim was itself an ancient stone device God used to give answers, named in the Old Testament, and early Latter-day Saints used the term loosely for both instruments from the start. There is no clean line between a sanctioned tool and a suspect one for the section to exploit.
Back in the room
Leave behind the dispute over what the Church taught and when, and walk back to the table. A barely schooled young man speaks a book aloud, hour upon hour, start to finish, with nothing laid out in front of him to read. The people writing it down sit close enough to touch him, follow the whole thing, and put their names to what they witnessed. A number of those witnesses would go on to leave the Church angry, and not one of them ever walked the account back.
The letters Joseph wrote in those same years sound nothing like the book they say came out of his mouth.
The CES Letter hands you this scene betting the strangeness of the hat will carry its case. Sit with it a bit longer and the strangeness cuts the other way. A method with no curtain, no smuggled manuscript, and a room full of witnesses who never flinched is close to the last arrangement a forger would pick, and close to just what you would expect from a man doing exactly what he claimed.
Whatever else you make of the seer stone, hold on to what came out of those weeks: roughly 270,000 words of intricate, internally consistent scripture, dictated once through with no draft and no source on the table, and never seriously explained away in the two centuries since. The Book of Mormon is the firmest ground the Church stands on. The hat the section played for its big finish ends up being, of all things, one of the stronger reasons to believe Joseph about where that book came from.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon Translation," pp. 28–31. The "rock in a hat" and "magic device or 'Ouija Board'" descriptions appear on p. 29; the institutional roll-call (Sunday School, Seminary, MTC, BYU, and the rest) on p. 29; and the closing block-quotes from McConkie and Ostler on pp. 30–31, capped by Runnells's question, "How could it have been expected of me and any other member to know about and to embrace the rock in the hat translation when even these two faithful full-time professors of religion at BYU rejected it as a fictitious lie meant to undermine Joseph Smith and the truth claims of the Restoration?" ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Richard Lloyd Anderson, "By the Gift and Power of God," Ensign, September 1977, 79. The seer-stone-in-hat translation method was described in the Church's flagship magazine more than three decades before the CES Letter, and over twenty years before the two BYU professors it cites dismissed the account. ↩︎
Russell M. Nelson, "A Treasured Testament," Ensign, July 1993, adapted from an address given 25 June 1992 to new mission presidents at the Missionary Training Center, Provo, Utah. Byline: "By Elder Russell M. Nelson of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles." Nelson quoted David Whitmer's full stone-in-hat description verbatim. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1993/07/a-treasured-testament. The Church continued to publish the method openly afterward: the first official photograph of the seer stone appeared in the Ensign (October 2015), the official Church video on the translation (2017) depicts Joseph with his face in a hat, and Saints, Volume 1 (2018) states plainly, "He would put the seer stone in his hat, place his face into the hat to block out the light, and peer at the stone." ↩︎