Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims
Three men near Kinderhook, Illinois, pulled off a hoax in 1843. They etched six small brass plates with acid until the surface looked covered in ancient writing, buried them in an old burial mound, and arranged for the plates to be "discovered." The goal was a sting: hand Joseph Smith a fake ancient record, wait for him to translate it as scripture, then confess the forgery in public and expose him as a fraud.
Nobody disputes that the plates were a nineteenth-century fake. The Church itself laid it out, decades ahead of the CES Letter, in an August 1981 Ensign article devoted to the hoax.[1]
The trap was real, and it took dead aim at the thing Joseph's whole claim rested on: his gift to translate ancient records by the power of God. So the question worth asking is what the bait actually caught.
What the trap caught
For the charge to work, Joseph has to have produced a confident translation, and the whole thing hangs on one line printed as his own words: "I have translated a portion of them."[2] Follow that line back to where it came from, and the case starts coming apart.
Joseph never wrote that line in the first person. It comes from History of the Church, a book put together and edited after he died. The original record is the journal of his clerk William Clayton, who wrote it in the third person, reporting that the plates were brought "to Joseph who has translated a portion." Later editors changed that "Joseph who has" to "I have" while assembling the published history. And the same 1981 Ensign the CES Letter cites is the very article that traced that rewrite and concluded Joseph "did not fall for the scheme."[1:1]
Even that thirdhand report shrinks under inspection. Historians reconstructing the day found that Joseph took one boat-shaped character off the plates, matched it to an entry in a secular Egyptian reference notebook he and his clerks had made in 1835, and read back the definition already written there.[3] One character, one lookup, one sentence about a descendant of Ham. After that, nothing: no manuscript, no scribe, no published translation, and no mention of the plates again in the fourteen months he had left to live. The forgers baited the hook for the gift they were sure would bite, and it never did.
The Kinderhook episode itself walks the 1843 events in full: the clerk's third-person note turned first-person, the lone character matched to a notebook, and the silence after May.
"Two clunkers and a third car"
The CES Letter does not stop at Kinderhook. It pairs the episode with the Book of Abraham and uses the two together to cast doubt on the Book of Mormon. The reasoning is simple: Joseph claimed to translate three ancient records, two of those went badly, so the third is suspect too. To drive it home, the CES Letter reaches for a used-car lot:
"After all, wouldn't you buy a third car from a man who had already sold you two clunkers?"[4]
The metaphor depends on the three projects being one kind of thing, and they are three different kinds of thing. Kinderhook was a non-event that produced one recycled sentence and left no manuscript at all. The Book of Abraham is a long scholarly debate over a text that carries genuinely ancient material Joseph had no ordinary way to know. The Book of Mormon is something else again: roughly a quarter-million words dictated aloud in front of scribes who never lost sight of his hands.
The bundling argument takes the used-car move apart: how Joseph used the word "translate" from one project to the next, why those projects do not belong in a single bucket, and why the Book of Mormon is actually the best-supported of them rather than the weakest, as the metaphor pretends.
Picture the scene the forgers were betting on. A man who made up scripture whenever it suited him would have pounced on a setup like this: trusting followers, a brand-new "ancient record," a crowd waiting to be impressed. A fraud had nothing to lose by performing.
What Joseph did instead barely registers. A glance at the plates, one character checked against a notebook, a revelation that was hoped for and did not arrive, and the whole affair fading into silence. A con man hands the eager crowd what it came for. Joseph let the moment pass, which is what you would expect from a man who thought the gift to translate came on God's terms and not his own, and who could feel that this time it had given him nothing.
So judge the gift, but judge it where there is something to judge. The same power that came up empty against fake plates had, more than a decade before, brought forth the Book of Mormon: roughly a quarter-million words in about two months, no source in the room, no draft to revise, and a row of witnesses who quarreled with Joseph for the rest of their lives and never once unsaid what they had seen and handled. A fraud who could fake that would never have walked away from the easy mark at Kinderhook. He walked away because the easy mark had nothing in it, and because the real gift had never worked that way.
Stanley B. Kimball, "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax," Ensign, August 1981. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/08/kinderhook-plates-brought-to-joseph-smith-appear-to-be-a-nineteenth-century-hoax. Reports the 1980 metallurgical analysis confirming nineteenth-century manufacture, traces the third-to-first-person rewrite of Clayton's journal entry, and concludes that Joseph "did not fall for the scheme." ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims," pp. 70–71. The first-person passage is attributed to Joseph Smith via History of the Church, Vol. 5, p. 372, but was compiled posthumously from William Clayton's third-person journal entry of May 1, 1843. ↩︎
Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, "President Joseph Has Translated a Portion: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates," in Producing Ancient Scripture (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020). A shorter accessible version appears as "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates," in A Reason for Faith, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: RSC, BYU; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 93–115. https://rsc.byu.edu/reason-faith/kinderhook-plates ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims," pp. 72–73. ↩︎