Book of Mormon Translation
Set the scene before you weigh the argument. Joseph Smith sits at a table with his face dropped into a hat, a small stone resting at the bottom of it, and dictates aloud for hours at a stretch. There are no plates open in front of him. No notebook, no draft, no shelf of borrowed books. There is no curtain between him and the man writing each line down at the same table, often Oliver Cowdery, sometimes Emma, who described herself sitting close enough to feel the work happen. People wander through the house while it goes on. He stops, he resumes, he never circles back to fix what he has already given.
Whatever you decide that scene proves, it has one feature worth fixing in mind: there is nowhere in it to hide a source text. A man with his face in a hat is not reading from anything. And every naturalistic account of where the Book of Mormon came from, the idea that Joseph copied it, or recited it from memory, or worked from a manuscript someone handed him, needs him consulting something while he speaks. The method has to make room for the trick. This one does not.
The CES Letter offers that detail as its punchline. It calls the instrument a "rock in a hat" and a "magic device or 'Ouija Board'" carried over from Joseph's treasure-hunting days, and stages the whole picture as faintly ridiculous.[1] The detail is real, and nothing here softens it: Joseph did use a seer stone, he did bury his face in a hat to read it, and the gold plates often sat wrapped on the table or in the next room while he worked. The response is not to deny the scene. It is to notice that the ridiculed detail is the exculpatory one. The arrangement that looks embarrassing at a glance is the same arrangement that makes deliberate fraud difficult to imagine.
"Hidden" is doing more work than it can carry
The section's most effective stroke is not the mockery. It is the betrayal. The seer stone is presented as something the Church concealed for more than a century and surrendered only when the internet pried it loose, and the chapels, the seminaries, the missionary discussions, and the magazines a member trusted are lined up in a row so the sense of having been lied to arrives before any evidence does.[1:1]
Two different complaints are traveling together inside that frame, and they do not deserve the same verdict.
One of them is fair. The method was genuinely under-emphasized for a long time. Chapel paintings showed Joseph poring directly over the plates, and correlated lessons rarely mentioned a stone or a hat at all. A member who built their mental picture from that art built an inaccurate one, and the gap between the foyer painting and the historical record was real enough that it shook people when they finally met it. Granting that costs the believer nothing, because it is true.
The other complaint is that the method was deliberately hidden, and the publication record simply does not bear it. The stone-in-hat description ran in the Church's own Ensign in September 1977.[2] Sixteen years later, in July 1993, Elder Russell M. Nelson, then a member of the Quorum of the Twelve and later President of the Church, quoted David Whitmer's full account of the method word for word in that same magazine, in an article adapted from an address he had given to more than a hundred new mission presidents at the Provo Missionary Training Center.[3] An Apostle taught the seer-stone-in-hat method openly, in the flagship Church magazine, twenty years before the 2013 Gospel Topics essay that the CES Letter treats as the Church's reluctant first confession. You cannot leak what your own magazine has already printed, twice, under an Apostle's name.
The timing matters because of where the CES Letter ends the section. Its closing exhibit is a long passage from two BYU religion professors, Joseph Fielding McConkie and Craig J. Ostler, who in 2000 dismissed Whitmer's stone-in-hat account as "fiction created for the purpose of demeaning Joseph Smith."[1:2] Runnells uses them as proof that the history was so obscure that even faithful scholars at the Church's own university had never absorbed it. But read against the calendar, the two professors prove the opposite of what they are enlisted to prove. They were writing in 2000, seven years after an Apostle had laid the same account out plainly in the Ensign. Their error was not that the Church had hidden the record from them. The record was sitting in print. Their error was getting it wrong while it was available, and the Church's official sources have moved steadily away from them ever since, through the 2013 essay, the first published photograph of the seer stone in the October 2015 Ensign, the 2017 Church video that shows Joseph with his face in a hat, and the plain-language account in Saints in 2018.[3:1] "Under-emphasized" is a real and answerable charge. "Concealed" is a different charge, and it does not survive its own footnotes.
That distinction is the hinge of the whole section, and it carries into both instruments the CES Letter discusses. The case against the seer stone is where most of the four pages live: the eyewitness testimony of the people in the room, the publication timeline that dismantles the "hidden until 2013" claim, the "Ouija Board" reduction that flattens a revelatory instrument into a parlor toy, and the question of what a face-in-a-hat method physically allows and forbids. The shorter move concerns the Urim and Thummim, which the CES Letter quietly arranges as the respectable instrument set against the embarrassing one, an "official" tool opposed to a folk-magic relic. That opposition does not hold. Early Latter-day Saints used the term loosely for both instruments from the beginning, and the Urim and Thummim of the Old Testament was itself a stone-based device God used to give answers. There is no clean line between a sanctioned instrument and a suspect one for the section to exploit.
Back in the room
Step out of the argument over what the Church taught and when, and return to the table. A young man with little formal schooling dictates aloud, hour after hour, in sequence, his face in a hat and nothing in front of him to read from. The people copying it down sit an arm's length away, watch the entire process, and afterward sign their names to what they saw. Several of them later leave the Church on bitter terms and still never take back a word of it. His own surviving letters from those years read nothing like the book they say he produced this way.
The CES Letter hands you that picture expecting the strangeness of the hat to do its work. Look at it a moment longer and the strangeness points the other direction. A method with no curtain, no hidden manuscript, and a roomful of unflinching witnesses is close to the worst possible setup for a man trying to pass off a fraud, and close to exactly what you would expect from a man doing what he said he was doing. The seer stone the section saves for its closing embarrassment turns out to be one of the better-attested reasons to take Joseph's own account of where the book came from seriously.
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?" ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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." ↩︎ ↩︎