Kinderhook Plates
The claim:
"The plates were named after the town in which they were found - Kinderhook, IL. A farmer claimed he dug the plates out of a mound. They took the plates to Joseph Smith for examination and he translated a portion."[1]
"Not only did Joseph not discern the fraud, he added to the fraud by 'translating' the fake plates. The LDS Church now concedes it's a hoax. What does this tell us about Joseph Smith's gift of translation?"[2]
In 1843, three men from Kinderhook, Illinois, a town downriver from Nauvoo, faked some old-looking brass plates, etched fake "Egyptian" characters into them, buried them in an Indian mound, and "discovered" them, all to bait Joseph Smith into translating a forgery. The CES Letter draws three claims from the episode:
- The bait worked: Joseph took the fake plates and translated part of them, declaring out loud that the person they were buried with had been a descendant of Pharaoh.
- The Church now admits the plates were a hoax.
- If Joseph's gift could be fooled by three local men with acid and beeswax, it cannot be trusted anywhere.
Two things in there are true. The plates really were a hoax. And Joseph did engage them rather than seeing through them on sight.
What the case depends on, though, is one specific sentence: Joseph Smith saying, in his own voice, "I have translated a portion of them." If you have read the CES Letter's Kinderhook pages, that line is the anchor of the whole thing. And that line is the one piece of the case Joseph Smith never wrote or said. The rest of the record bends the same direction: no translation of the plates ever appeared, no manuscript and no scribe ever turned up, and the men who forged the plates kept the joke to themselves for thirty-five years.
The sentence he never said
The quote comes from History of the Church, a multi-volume narrative published in Joseph's voice, as if he had penned it himself. There it reads, "I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found."[3] First person. Confident. Finished.
The actual source behind that sentence is a journal kept by William Clayton, Joseph's clerk. Clayton wrote his entry on May 1, 1843, the day things happened, and he wrote it not in Joseph's voice but his own, reporting what he understood Joseph to have said:
"Prest J. has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found & he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven & earth."[4]
The speaker is Clayton. The subject is "Prest J.," President Joseph, in the third person: he "has translated a portion." That is a secretary jotting down secondhand what the boss told him, the same way Clayton recorded dozens of other reports in that journal.
So how did a clerk's secondhand note become Joseph's first-person testimony? Editors did it, years after Joseph was dead. The History of the Church was stitched together from journals, letters, and reports and then rewritten throughout into a single first-person narrative, as though Joseph were the author of all of it. That was a normal way to assemble a biography in the 1800s. "In his own words" was a style choice, not a claim that Joseph literally wrote each line. When the editors reached Clayton's entry, "Prest J. has translated a portion" became "I have translated a portion of them," and that rewritten version is the one that circulated for the next century.
| Source | Voice | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Clayton's journal (May 1, 1843) | Third-person clerk | "Prest J. has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found" |
| History of the Church (compiled after his death) | First-person rewrite | "I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found" |
The sentence at the center of the case is not Joseph's statement. It is an editor's paraphrase of a clerk's paraphrase, put into Joseph's mouth after he was murdered. And the Church itself said so in print, back in 1981.
What Joseph actually did with the plates
The best account of what Joseph physically did comes from historians Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, who reconstructed the episode in a long scholarly study.[5] Their answer fits neither familiar picture: it is smaller than the confident prophetic translation the CES Letter describes, and stranger than a Joseph who never touched the plates at all.
Back in 1835, Joseph and some of his clerks had compiled a homemade document later known as the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, the GAEL for short. It tried to pair Egyptian-looking characters with English meanings. Scholars across the board, Latter-day Saint and not, agree it does not actually decode Egyptian; it was an amateur working notebook, not a real grammar.
When the Kinderhook plates crossed his desk, Joseph appears to have found one character on them that resembled a character already sitting in his GAEL, a figure the GAEL labeled "Ha e oop hah." He looked up what his own notebook said that character meant. The GAEL's pre-written definition, original spelling and all, read: "honor by birth, kingly power by the line of Pharoah… possessor of heaven and earth."[6] Now compare that to what Clayton reported Joseph saying the plates contained: "a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven & earth." It is the same content. Joseph did not translate anything off the plates. He matched one character to an entry in a book on his shelf and read the entry back.
A man who was in the room, apparently not a Latter-day Saint, described it in a letter to the New York Herald, and he used exactly the right verb: "He compared them in my presence with his Egyptian alphabet… and they are evidently the same characters."[7] He compared them. The seer stone stayed in his pocket, and so did any claim that God was revealing something. This was a man holding a fake artifact next to his own flawed reference book and reading off the match.
He said he might translate them, and he never did
There is a second record from that same week, and the CES Letter never mentions it. Charlotte Haven, a young non-Mormon visitor to Nauvoo, was writing candid letters home. Her letter of May 2, 1843, the day after Clayton's note, passes along what a Mr. Moore, the man who had carried the plates to Joseph, told her household about the encounter. As the story reached her, Joseph said the characters looked like the writing of the Book of Mormon, "and if Mr. Moore could leave them, he thought that by the help of revelation he would be able to translate them."[8]
If the plates were left with him. He thought he might. By the help of revelation he had not yet received. He would be able to translate them, someday, maybe. Every word is conditional and future tense. This is a man saying translation might be possible later if inspiration came, which is the exact opposite of a man announcing he had already done it. He left the door open without ever walking through it.
That report is thirdhand, Joseph to Moore to Haven, and the historians who reconstructed the episode call the picture it gives plausible rather than certain.[5:1] But it squares with everything else from those days. No revelation came. The plates never stayed with him in any lasting way. No translation was ever produced. Joseph's own journal that day, May 1, says only, "rode out. fore noon & afte[r]noon."[9] Not a word about plates, Pharaoh, or translating anything.
The trap that never closed
Joseph was a controversial figure, surrounded by enemies, and an obvious fraud would have been a gift to them. Nobody had more reason to expose him fast than the forgers themselves: a prophet suckered into a public, confident, fake translation was the whole point of the prank. One forger, Wilbur Fugate, finally confessed in letters written in 1878 and 1879: the plates were "a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself," made "by way of a joke."[10] The first of those letters came thirty-five years after the fact, and thirty-four years after Joseph was already dead. If the trap had really snapped shut, why did the men who built it keep quiet until Joseph was decades in the grave?
Fugate sat on the secret for decades because there was nothing dramatic to expose. Joseph had glanced at the plates, made one shaky character match, asked for the plates to be sent to outside experts before he would commit to anything, and then let the whole thing quietly drop. There was no "Book of Kinderhook," no manuscript, no scribe, no second Book of Mormon. After a single journal mention on May 7, the plates drop out of Joseph's own record: no known sermon, letter, or journal entry of his mentions them again. The trap was baited and set, and Joseph nibbled as far as curiosity alone would carry him, then backed off before it could close.
Joseph didn't catch the forgery
The rewritten quote collapses on inspection. The difficulty is what is left after you correct it: Joseph engaged a forgery at face value. He picked up a flawed homemade notebook, matched a character, and offered a tentative reading of the plates' "history" that was wrong twice over: the plates were a fake, and his GAEL could not actually decode Egyptian. In this episode, his prophetic discernment failed. The record does not show him spotting the fraud, and it does not show a divine warning stopping him; the case for Joseph does not need either story.
From there the CES Letter leaps past what the record can carry. That Joseph failed to catch the fraud is true. That he confidently produced a translation the Church then defended for a century before chemistry forced a confession is not. The deeper worry, that Joseph's GAEL also stands behind the Book of Abraham, is a fair and harder question, but it is a different one, taken up where it belongs in the Book of Abraham papyri article and the broader Translator Claims page. On the narrow question of these plates, the difficulty is bounded: a sincere amateur got fooled and guessed wrong. The in-depth version meets the strongest forms of the critique head-on.
The Church corrected the record in 1981
The CES Letter's picture needs the Church to have hidden the contradiction for 138 years and then caved only when 1980 lab testing made denial impossible. The actual timeline does not cooperate.
In August 1981, the Church's own magazine, the Ensign, ran a long article that flatly called the plates a nineteenth-century hoax, reported the metallurgical testing that proved it, walked through the forgers' confessions, and, in the same piece, identified the first-person quote as an editorial rewrite of Clayton's third-person original. It even concluded that "Joseph Smith needs no defense—he simply did not fall for the scheme."[11]
That article ran in 1981. The CES Letter first appeared in 2013. The "cover-up" the CES Letter describes was corrected, by the Church, in the Church's own magazine, thirty-two years before the criticism was written. Anyone following the CES Letter's own citation to that Ensign finds the correction.
The Church's current history page says the same thing today: the plates were faked, the forgers admitted it, and Joseph "evidently did not attempt a revelatory translation."[12]
What the episode says about Joseph's gift
Hand Joseph a forgery and his "gift" produces one mismatched character and then silence. Hand him genuine source material and the same gift produces the Book of Mormon, dictated out loud in roughly sixty working days, without notes or rewrites, witnessed from first page to last, and never retracted.[13] The Joseph Smith Papers historians, who have read every scrap of paper he left, sum the Kinderhook side up dryly: "no translation endorsed by JS has been located."[14] A man running a translation con does not go quiet the moment a fake is placed in his hands. A man with a real but limited gift, who reaches for it and finds it gets no grip on a worthless object, does exactly that.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims," no. 1, p. 71. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims," no. 2, p. 72. ↩︎
History of the Church, Vol. 5, p. 372 (1909 first book-edition publication; B. H. Roberts seven-volume edition published 1902–1932). The first-person rewrite ("I have translated a portion of them") replaces Clayton's contemporaneous third-person paraphrase ("Prest J. has translated a portion"). This documentary chain is identified explicitly in Kimball, "Kinderhook Plates" (1981), and confirmed in Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "President Joseph Has Translated a Portion" (2020). ↩︎
William Clayton, journal, May 1, 1843, as quoted in James B. Allen, No Toil nor Labor Fear: The Story of William Clayton (Provo, UT: BYU Press, 2002), 393, and reproduced in Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates," in A Reason for Faith, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 98. The entry reads in the third person ("Prest J. has translated a portion") and was rewritten into first person by mid-nineteenth-century History of the Church compilers. ↩︎
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: Joseph Smith's Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, ed. Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst-McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2020), 452–523. The 70-page chapter is the definitive scholarly treatment of the Kinderhook incident. The authors' argument, in both its 2020 and shorter 2016 forms, documents (1) the documentary chain from Clayton's third-person paraphrase to the History of the Church first-person rewrite; (2) the GAEL match for the Ham/Pharaoh content; (3) the secular-tools framing (GAEL plus Hebrew lexicon, no seer stone, no Urim and Thummim, no claim of revelation); (4) the absence of a sustained translation manuscript; and (5) the absence of any claim of revealed translation in the sources close to the event. Direct quotations in this article are taken from the shorter treatment, Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates," in A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 93–115, which is available in PDF at https://rsc.byu.edu/sites/default/files/pub_content/pdf/Joseph_Smith_and_the_Kinderhook_Plates.pdf — "there is no mention of Joseph Smith using the Urim and Thummim or a seer stone or divine revelation of any kind in any of the sources close to the event" and "an enthusiastic, yet amateur, linguist" are at p. 110; the third-hand assessment of Haven's letter and "the available sources do not settle this with certainty" at p. 105; the discovery narrative at pp. 93–95; the boat-shaped-character analysis at pp. 107–9. ↩︎ ↩︎
The GAEL interpretation for the character "Ha e oop hah" reads in full, with the manuscript's spellings: "honor by birth, kingly power by the line of Pharoah. possession by birth one who riegns upon his throne universally—possessor of heaven and earth, and of the blessings of the earth." It appears on the fourth page of the GAEL manuscript (1835), in the hand of W. W. Phelps. Quoted in Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates," in A Reason for Faith: Navigating LDS Doctrine and Church History, ed. Laura Harris Hales (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center; Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2016), 107 (https://rsc.byu.edu/reason-faith/kinderhook-plates); documented at length in Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "President Joseph Has Translated a Portion" (2020). ↩︎
"A Gentile," letter to James Gordon Bennett, May 7, 1843, as published in "Late and Interesting from the Mormon Empire on the Upper Mississippi," New York Herald, May 30, 1843; quoted in Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates" (2016), 106 and note 59. The pseudonymous correspondent was one of the group present on May 7 and, by his chosen pen name, apparently not a Latter-day Saint; Bradley and Ashurst-McGee decline to identify him further, and they suggest his "Egyptian alphabet … took from the plates from which the Book of Mormon was translated" remark conflates the Book of Mormon with the Book of Abraham, the project the GAEL actually belonged to, because Joseph was far better known for the former. ↩︎
Charlotte Haven, letter, May 2, 1843. Published in "A Girl's Letters from Nauvoo," Overland Monthly (December 1890). https://bhroberts.org/records/0yAxfr-07lXyI/charlotte_haven_describes_her_encounter_with_the_kinderhook_plates. Haven's letter records: "When he showed them to Joseph, the latter said that the figures or writing on them was similar to that in which the Book of Mormon was written, and if Mr. Moore could leave them, he thought that by the help of revelation he would be able to translate them." Haven wrote "Joshua Moore," but the carrier was most likely George Moore, the Unitarian minister from Quincy she names in later letters; the name may have been miswritten by Haven or mistranscribed by her publisher (Bradley and Ashurst-McGee [2016], 94 and note 7). Bradley and Ashurst-McGee also note Haven's occasional tendency toward overstatement: her "five or six inches" is roughly twice the surviving plate's actual size (2016, 105 and note 58). ↩︎
Joseph Smith, journal entry, May 1, 1843, in Joseph Smith Papers, Journal, December 1842–June 1844, Book 2, p. 186. https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/journal-december-1842-june-1844-book-2-10-march-1843-14-july-1843/194. The complete entry: "Monday May 1. 1833 1843 rode out. fore noon & afte[r]noon." (The "1833" is a scribal slip corrected to 1843.) ↩︎
Wilbur Fugate, letters to James T. Cobb: April 8, 1878 (unpublished; Theodore Albert Schroeder Papers, Wisconsin Historical Society, Madison) and June 30, 1879, the latter published in Wilhelm Wyl, Mormon Portraits, or the Truth about Mormon Leaders from 1830 to 1886 (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Co., 1886), 207–8. Quotations as printed in Stanley B. Kimball, "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax," Ensign 11, no. 8 (August 1981): 66–74: the plates were "a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself"; "None of the nine persons who signed the certificate knew the secret, except Wiley and I"; "We read in Pratt's prophecy that 'Truth is yet to spring out of the earth.' We concluded to prove the prophecy by way of a joke." On the letters' dates, archive, and publication, see Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates" (2016), 95–97 and notes 2, 5, and 12. ↩︎
Stanley B. Kimball, "Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax," Ensign 11, no. 8 (August 1981): 66–74. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1981/08/kinderhook-plates-brought-to-joseph-smith-appear-to-be-a-nineteenth-century-hoax. Kimball reports that Professor D. Lynn Johnson of Northwestern University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering performed destructive metallurgical analysis on the surviving Kinderhook plate using scanning electron microscopy, scanning auger microprobe, X-ray fluorescence, and microscopic examination. The plate was determined to be "a true brass alloy of approximately 73 percent copper, 24 percent zinc," consistent with mid-nineteenth-century manufacture, with characters produced by acid etching rather than engraving. The article also identifies the History of the Church first-person quote as a posthumous editorial rewrite of William Clayton's contemporaneous third-person journal entry ("Although this account appears to be the writing of Joseph Smith, it is actually an excerpt from a journal of William Clayton"). It does not engage Welby Ricks's 1962 Improvement Era defense of the plates' authenticity by name, but its hoax finding displaced that position in the Church's magazine of record. ↩︎
"Kinderhook Plates," Church History Topics, churchofjesuschrist.org, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/kinderhook-plates?lang=eng. The current official Church position. The page identifies the plates as a hoax, notes the forgers' confessions, confirms the metallurgical analysis, and states that Joseph "evidently did not attempt a revelatory translation as he had done with the Book of Mormon plates, but rather appears to have compared the symbols on the Kinderhook plates with other ancient artifacts in his possession." ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 10–50. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/. Welch reconstructs the Book of Mormon translation timeline (April 7 – June 30, 1829) and concludes that the actual translation work occupied "not many more than the equivalent of about 60 actual working days." ↩︎
Editorial footnote to Joseph Smith, journal entry, May 7, 1843, in Joseph Smith Papers, Journal, December 1842–June 1844, Book 2, p. 195. The full editorial assessment: "No further mention of the plates is made in JS's journal after this 7 May entry, and no translation endorsed by JS has been located, suggesting that whatever JS initially thought about the plates, he soon lost interest in them." ↩︎