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.
A word on the instrument, since the whole section turns on it. A "seer stone" was a small stone an early-American villager might use to "see" things hidden from ordinary sight, lost objects or buried treasure. Joseph owned one before he ever had the plates. The gold plates themselves came with a second instrument the early Saints called the "interpreters," two clear stones set in a frame, and Joseph used both to produce the book. Whatever you decide that scene proves, it has one feature worth fixing in mind: there is nowhere in it to hide a source text. Every naturalistic account of where the Book of Mormon came from, that Joseph copied it, 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. Denying the scene is not the answer; the answer is to notice that the very detail being ridiculed is the one that clears Joseph. 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 at all, but the sense of betrayal underneath it. 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, the second time 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 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 the seer stone article lays out the full publication timeline behind it, nine Church-published references across forty-seven years with the 2013 essay sitting in the middle of the record rather than at its start.
The people who watched it happen
Step away from the argument over what the Church taught and when, and look at the event itself, because this is the part the section never weighs. The translation of the Book of Mormon is among the best-witnessed episodes in early Latter-day Saint history. More than two hundred historical documents preserve accounts of it, and at least a dozen people watched it directly, scribes who took down the words and family members who sat nearby for hours.[4] Their descriptions hold steady across sixty years, and not one of them ever recanted, including the men who left the Church on bitter terms.
Start with the woman who sat across the table. Emma Smith served as one of Joseph's earliest scribes, watched the dictation from feet away, and spent the last forty years of her life outside the Utah Church with nothing to gain by defending it. Three months before she died, she told her son:
"He had neither manuscript nor book to read from. If he had had anything of the kind he could not have concealed it from me."[5]
She also recalled the day Joseph stopped suddenly, pale as a sheet, and asked her whether Jerusalem had walls around it.[6] A man composing his own scripture does not interrupt the work to ask his wife about the geography of the holy city.
David Whitmer is the harder witness for the critic to wave off. He left the Church in 1838, never came back, founded a rival movement, and spent fifty years publicly critical of Brigham Young. In the same 1887 book where he criticized Joseph by name, he described the method without a flicker of doubt:
"Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine."[7]
That is the passage the CES Letter quotes only through McConkie and Ostler's hostile frame, so a reader meets it labeled "fiction" before ever seeing what Whitmer actually wrote.
Then there is a piece of evidence that cuts directly at the memorization theory. In early 1828 Martin Harris quietly swapped Joseph's seer stone for an ordinary look-alike rock before a session, hoping "to stop the mouths of fools, who had told him that the Prophet had learned those sentences and was merely repeating them." Joseph sat, paused a long time, and finally said, "Martin, what is the matter, all is as dark as Egypt."[8] Whatever one makes of the stone, the swap was made without Joseph's knowledge, and the text simply would not come from the substitute. A man reciting memorized lines does not need the right rock.
The corroboration that should give a skeptic the most pause comes from outside the faith. Michael Morse, Joseph's brother-in-law, never joined the Church and had no stake in its story. He watched the work and described exactly what the believers described: Joseph put the seer stone in a hat, drew the brim over his face, and dictated to the scribe.[9] When a hostile or indifferent witness independently confirms the embarrassing detail, that detail stops looking like an apologetic invention and starts looking like plain fact.
Key Point
The witnesses agree on the core: Joseph placed a stone in a hat, pressed his face into it to block the light, and dictated aloud to a scribe seated an arm's length away. No curtain, no concealment, no hidden manuscript. Believers, a teenage onlooker, a hostile non-member, and a man who later founded a rival church all describe the same scene, and none of them ever took it back.
"Magic device or Ouija Board"
The section's other reflex is to set the seer stone beside a parlor-game divining board and let a modern reader's instinct about "occult" objects finish the argument. The move assumes that because Joseph used the stone in treasure-seeking before 1827, his use of it to translate afterward is discredited by association. That is an argument from origins, and it is worth slowing down on, because the real folk-magic context is more interesting than either side's caricature.
The context is real and is not hidden here. Joseph grew up in a folk-religion-saturated culture, obtained a chocolate-brown seer stone around 1822, and used it for several years in paid treasure expeditions. In March 1826 he was brought before a justice of the peace in Bainbridge, New York, in a matter of legal record.[10] None of that is in dispute, and the seer stone article treats it at length rather than tiptoeing around it.
What the "magic device" label leans on is a tidy split between "magic" and "religion" that the relevant scholarship does not actually grant. The folklorist Eric Eliason has argued that the line between respectable institutional "religion" and disreputable folk "magic" was a polemical category invented by Reformation-era theologians to discredit popular practice, not a stable description of how God has worked.[11] Calling the seer stone a "magic device," read that way, is a rhetorical sorting, not a historical finding.
The deeper answer is that God redirecting a culturally familiar object toward a sacred purpose is not an embarrassment to the biblical pattern. It is the biblical pattern. The rod in Moses's hand was an ordinary shepherd's staff before it parted the sea. Solomon's temple borrowed its architecture from Israel's Phoenician neighbors. The high priest's breastplate carried stones used to inquire of the Lord, and the casting of lots that selected a king and replaced an apostle would read as divination anywhere outside the covenant. Bushman, who places Joseph squarely inside his folk-religious culture, draws the line exactly:
"Biblical Christianity was the overwhelming influence in the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. Folk magic was in the mix but was not the basic ingredient."[12]
Within his setting Joseph was unremarkable: a New England farm boy in a world where neighbors believed stones could see hidden things. Then he produced something that setting could not predict, a coherent ancient-style record of roughly 270,000 words, dictated in a matter of weeks, with no draft and nothing to copy from. The folk-magic provenance objection works only if you expect revelation to arrive disconnected from anything human hands already touched. Scripture sets the opposite expectation throughout.
The two instruments are not opposites
A quieter assumption runs underneath the whole section, and it deserves its own light. The CES Letter treats "Urim and Thummim" as the respectable, official instrument and the "seer stone" as the embarrassing folk-magic one, two different objects staged as opposites so the gap between them can look like a cover-up. That framing does not survive the documentary record.
"Urim and Thummim" is a biblical term with a three-thousand-year history outside any Latter-day Saint context. In the Old Testament it names a stone-based instrument carried in the high priest's breastplate and used to receive answers from God (Exodus 28:30; Leviticus 8:8; Numbers 27:21). A reader who met the phrase only through the CES Letter would never learn it had any history at all. The book-length scholarly study by the Reformed Old Testament scholar Cornelis Van Dam reads the biblical instrument as a light-mediated revelatory device rather than a simple lot-casting tool, which would place it in the same category as the Nephite interpreters and Joseph's seer stone. That light-based reading is a minority position (most scholars still treat the biblical instrument as some form of lot-casting), but it is well argued and peer-reviewed, and even setting it aside, the Book of Mormon's own description of its instrument fits the revelatory-stone pattern.[13]
The early Saints used the term loosely from the very start. The man who wrote most of the Book of Mormon from Joseph's lips said so in print in 1834, in his own hand, almost two centuries before the date the CES Letter assigns to the Church's "admission":
"...as he translated, with the Urim and Thummim, or, as the Nephites would have said, 'Interpreters'..."[14]
Cowdery is using the biblical phrase as an umbrella that covers the Nephite instrument and its native name. The Church's 2013 Gospel Topics essay says the same thing, that the two instruments "were apparently interchangeable" and that Joseph and his associates "often used the term 'Urim and Thummim' to refer to the single stone as well as the interpreters."[15] The terminology the CES Letter reads as a fingerprint of concealment was on the record from the beginning.
The Book of Mormon describes its own instrument from the inside, and the description was printed in 1830, before the Saints had adopted the biblical label at all. The book calls the instrument "interpreters" and specifies "those two stones which were fastened into the two rims of a bow," prepared by God and handed down across generations "for the purpose of interpreting languages."[16] That is the same two-stones-in-a-frame object the eyewitnesses later described. Whatever happened to the vocabulary in the 1830s, the substance was on the printed page before the argument could be made. The Urim and Thummim article walks the full terminology timeline and the biblical parallels point by point.
Back in the room
So step out of the argument over labels and curriculum 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, several of them with every reason to expose a fraud, is close to the worst arrangement a deceiver could choose and close to exactly what you would expect from a man doing what he said he was doing.
The whole record went from first dictated line to finished manuscript in roughly twelve weeks, under the eyes of scribes who never lost the thread, and it came out one coherent work that no one has explained away in the two centuries since. The seer stone the section saves for its closing embarrassment turns out to be one of the better 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 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." ↩︎ ↩︎
Scripture Central Evidence, "Translation Witnesses." https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/translation-witnesses. Documents over 200 historical documents preserving translation accounts and at least 12 primary witnesses. ↩︎
Emma Smith Bidamon, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published as "Last Testimony of Sister Emma," The Saints' Herald 26, no. 19 (October 1, 1879): 289–290. Reprinted in Dan Vogel, ed., Early Mormon Documents, 5 vols. (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1996–2003), 1:539–543. ↩︎
Emma Smith, interviewed by Edmund C. Briggs at Nauvoo in 1856; recounted in Edmund C. Briggs, "A Visit to Nauvoo in 1856," Journal of History 9, no. 4 (October 1916): 454; reprinted in John W. Welch and Erick B. Carlson, eds., Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844 (Provo, UT: BYU Press; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2005), 129. Briggs records Emma recalling that Joseph "stopped suddenly, pale as a sheet," asked "Emma, did Jerusalem have walls around it?" and, told yes, replied, "Oh! I was afraid I had been deceived." Briggs published the recollection sixty years after the conversation. ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer, 1887), 12. Whitmer left the Church in 1838 and never returned; he gave more than 60 interviews 1878–1888 and never recanted. ↩︎
Martin Harris statements compiled in Andrew Jenson, "Martin Harris," Historical Record 6 (1887); Edward Stevenson, Reminiscences of Joseph the Prophet (Salt Lake City, 1893); and Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, vol. 2. The substitute-stone test is recorded in Kenneth W. Godfrey, "A New Prophet and a New Scripture: The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon," Ensign (January 1988). https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1988/01/a-new-prophet-and-a-new-scripture-the-coming-forth-of-the-book-of-mormon ↩︎
Michael Morse, interview by William W. Blair, The Saints' Herald 26 (June 15, 1879): 190–191. Reproduced in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, vol. 5. Morse, a non-believer brother-in-law of Joseph, never became a Latter-day Saint. ↩︎
Joseph Smith Papers, "Introduction to State of New York v. JS-A." https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/introduction-to-state-of-new-york-v-js-a/1. Direct quote on the statute language: "The use of the word 'pretending' reflected Enlightenment-era legal assumptions that the use of seer stones was categorically deceptive and fraudulent, regardless of whether the accused sincerely believed that they had access to uncommon powers." See also Church History Topics, "Joseph Smith's 1826 Trial," https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/joseph-smiths-1826-trial?lang=eng ↩︎
Eric Eliason, "Seer Stones, Salamanders, and Early Mormon 'Folk Magic' in the Light of Folklore Studies and Bible Scholarship," BYU Studies Quarterly 55, no. 1 (2016): 73–93. Eliason argues, drawing on the broader folklore-studies and history-of-religion literature, that the "magic vs. religion" distinction is a polemical category constructed by Reformation-era theologians rather than a stable scholarly classification. Eliason invokes Wouter J. Hanegraaff's influential argument that the magic/religion distinction "belongs to the domain of theological polemics... and cannot claim any scholarly foundation." https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/seer-stones-salamanders-and-early-mormon-folk-magic-in-the-light-of-folklore-studies-and-bible-scholarship ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005). The "biblical Christianity was the overwhelming influence" passage appears in the early chapters discussing the cultural context of the translation period. ↩︎
Cornelis Van Dam, The Urim and Thummim: A Means of Revelation in Ancient Israel (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997), ISBN 978-0-931464-83-6 (original hardcover); paperback reprint ISBN 978-1-57506-406-2. Van Dam argues from the Hebrew root 'or ("light") that Urim means "lights"; from tom ("perfection," "completeness") that Thummim means "perfections"; and that the biblical evidence supports a light-based "appearance of light" reading rather than binary lot-casting. ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery, "Letter I" to W.W. Phelps, Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate 1, no. 1 (October 1834): 14. Cowdery's passage: "Day after day I continued, uninterrupted, to write from his mouth, as he translated, with the Urim and Thummim, or, as the Nephites would have said, 'Interpreters,' the history or record called 'The book of Mormon.'" (The "I wrote, with my own pen, the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages)" phrasing comes from Cowdery's later 1848 Kanesville statement, not this 1834 letter.) ↩︎
Gospel Topics Essay, "Book of Mormon Translation" (December 2013), https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-translation. "These two instruments — the interpreters and the seer stone — were apparently interchangeable and worked in much the same way such that, in the course of time, Joseph Smith and his associates often used the term 'Urim and Thummim' to refer to the single stone as well as the interpreters." ↩︎
Mosiah 28:13–16: "And now he translated them by the means of those two stones which were fastened into the two rims of a bow. Now these things were prepared from the beginning, and were handed down from generation to generation, for the purpose of interpreting languages." ↩︎