Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims
In the spring of 1843, three men near Kinderhook, Illinois set a trap. Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton, and Wilbur Fugate etched six small brass plates with acid until they were covered in strange characters, aged them, buried them in an old mound, and arranged to have them "discovered." The plan was simple and patient: hand Joseph Smith an ancient-looking record and wait for him to declare it scripture, at which point a public confession from the forgers would unmask him as a fraud. That the plates were a nineteenth-century fake is not a point anyone contests. The Church reported it in print, in the August 1981 Ensign, more than three decades before the CES Letter took up the episode.[1]
So the hoax was real, and it was aimed straight at the prophet's gift. The interesting question is the one the trap was built to extract an answer to. Handed a tempting forgery and a waiting audience, what did Joseph Smith actually produce?
Almost nothing, which is the part the framing has to work around.
What the trap caught
The CES Letter needs the answer to be a bold, revelatory translation, and it rests the charge on a single line printed as Joseph's own words: "I have translated a portion of them."[2] Follow that sentence back to where it comes from and the case begins to give way.
The first-person confession is not Joseph's first-person sentence. It appears in History of the Church, a volume compiled and edited after his death. The contemporaneous source is the journal of his clerk William Clayton, and Clayton wrote in the third person: "President Joseph has translated a portion." Mid-century editors recast the pronoun into "I" while assembling the published history. The 1981 Ensign the CES Letter cites by its headline is the very article that traced this rewrite, line by line, and concluded Joseph "did not fall for the scheme."[1:1]
What sits behind even that thirdhand report is smaller still. Reconstructing the day from the surviving records, Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee found that Joseph took one boat-shaped character off the plates, located a matching entry in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, the secular reference notebook he and his clerks had drawn up in 1835, and read back the definition already written there.[3] One character, one lookup, a scholarly aid rather than a seer stone, yielding the single sentence about a descendant of Ham. Then the trail stops. No manuscript, no scribe assigned, no published translation, no further mention of the plates in the fourteen months Joseph had left to live. The forgers had baited a hook for the gift they expected to provoke, and the gift never switched on.
"Two clunkers and a third car"
Having set up that result, the CES Letter does not let it stand alone. It folds Kinderhook together with the Book of Abraham and turns the pair into a verdict on the Book of Mormon: two of Joseph's three "translations" failed, so why trust the third? The image it reaches for is a used-car lot. "Wouldn't you buy a third car from a man who had already sold you two clunkers?"[4]
The line is memorable, and it only works if the three projects are the same kind of thing. They are not. The Kinderhook engagement was a non-event that produced a single recycled sentence in under a week and left no manuscript at all. The Book of Abraham is a long-running scholarly debate over a text that carries authentically ancient material Joseph had no ordinary way to know. The Book of Mormon is a quarter-million-word dictation with the fullest witness record of the three, produced in the open with scribes who watched every line. Scoring this "two out of three" quietly files the best-attested dictation of the set in the same drawer as a forged trinket nobody translated.
The two sub-articles take the two halves in turn. The Kinderhook episode itself walks the 1843 events: the third-person clerk's note turned into a first-person confession, the lone character matched against a notebook, the silence after May, and the Ensign that named the hoax and corrected the quote long before the CES Letter retold it. The bundling argument takes apart the used-car move: what "translate" actually meant across Joseph's different projects, why they belong in different categories, and why the Book of Mormon sits at the strong end of the chain rather than the weak end where the metaphor slides it.
Picture the scene the forgers were counting on. A man who manufactured scripture on demand had every reason to seize this one: eager believers, a fresh "ancient record," an audience leaning in. A confident translation would have cost him nothing he was not already willing to spend. Instead he glanced at the plates, matched one character to a reference book, waited on a revelation that never came, and let the matter drop into fourteen months of silence. That is a strange way for a fraud to behave when fraud is exactly what the moment invited. It reads far more like a man who believed the gift of translation was never his to summon at will, and who knew that this time, nothing had been given him.
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. ↩︎