Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims
This section covers a single staged event and the argument the CES Letter builds on top of it. Both halves are easy to state simply, before any names or dates arrive.
The event: in 1843, near a small Illinois town called Kinderhook, three men faked some ancient-looking metal plates and got them in front of Joseph Smith, hoping he would declare them scripture so they could then announce the fraud and expose him. The plates were a hoax, and nobody disputes that. The question is what Joseph did when handed the bait.
The argument: the CES Letter takes that episode, pairs it with the Book of Abraham, and turns the two into a verdict on the Book of Mormon. Joseph claimed three times to translate ancient records, the reasoning runs, and two of the three went badly, so why trust the third? The image it settles on is a used-car lot.[1]
So there are two things to weigh here. What actually happened at Kinderhook, and whether stacking that episode against the Book of Abraham licenses doubting the Book of Mormon. The first turns out to be far smaller than the framing needs. The second has the chain pointed backwards.
The hoax was real, and aimed straight at the prophet's gift
In the spring of 1843, three men near Kinderhook set a trap. Robert Wiley, a local cooper, Bridge Whitton, a blacksmith, and Wilbur Fugate etched six small bell-shaped brass plates with acid until they were covered in strange characters, aged them, buried them in an old Indian mound, and arranged to have them "discovered."[2] The plan was patient: hand Joseph Smith an ancient-looking record, wait for him to declare it scripture, and then spring a public confession that would unmask him as a fraud.
That the plates were a nineteenth-century fake is not a point anyone contests. The forgers later confessed. Wilbur Fugate put it bluntly in 1878:
"Those plates are a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself. None of the nine persons who signed the certificate knew the secret… I know they are a humbug, for I helped to make them, with my own hands."[3]
In 1980 a materials scientist at Northwestern University ran destructive chemical analysis on the one surviving plate, with the Chicago Historical Society's permission, and confirmed it: a brass alloy of roughly 73 percent copper and 24 percent zinc, characters bitten in with acid rather than engraved, a chemical signature of mid-nineteenth-century manufacture. The Church reported the whole thing in print, in the August 1981 Ensign, more than three decades before the CES Letter took up the episode.[4]
So the hoax is settled, and the forgers aimed the trap straight at the gift Joseph built his prophetic identity on. There is a quiet piece of evidence in the silence of the hoaxers that followed. If the trap had closed, if Joseph had produced a public, embarrassing translation of fake plates, the forgers had every reason to expose him at once. Joseph was a controversial figure throughout the 1840s, hunted by enemies, killed by a mob in 1844, and the subject of decades of hostile literature in which a documented case of fraudulent prophecy would have been a centerpiece.
They said nothing. Bridge Whitton's confession survives in a private 1855 letter that did not surface until 1912. Wilbur Fugate did not put his confession on the record until 1878, thirty-five years after the episode and thirty-four years after Joseph's death.[3:1] The simplest explanation for the delay is that there was nothing to expose during Joseph's lifetime. The trap was baited and laid, and Joseph never stepped far enough into it to spring it.
The "smoking gun" quote is not Joseph's sentence
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."[5] 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 multi-volume narrative compiled and edited after his death. The contemporaneous source behind it is the journal of his clerk William Clayton, and Clayton wrote in the third person:
"They brought them to Joseph who has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found and 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 and earth."[6]
A clerk reporting what his employer said in conversation is a different kind of record from a prophet writing in his own voice. Mid-century editors recast Clayton's "Joseph has translated" into "I have translated" while assembling the published history, a routine nineteenth-century convention of writing biography in the subject's voice. The change matters because the whole "smoking gun" depends on the reader hearing Joseph make a confident first-person claim. He never made it.
The part that should give a fair reader pause is where the citation leads. The 1981 Ensign article the CES Letter cites by its headline is the very article that traced this rewrite, line by line, and concluded that Joseph "did not fall for the scheme."[4:1] The correction the CES Letter presents as a reluctant, recent admission was published, by the Church, in the Church's own magazine, in the same article the CES Letter quotes. Anyone who follows the citation arrives at the document that dismantles the argument.
What Joseph actually did, and did not do
Strip away the rewritten quote and the question becomes what sits behind even Clayton's thirdhand report. Reconstructing the day from the surviving records, the historians Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee found something far smaller than a translation.[2:1]
Joseph took a single boat-shaped character off the plates and matched it to a similar character in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language, a secular reference notebook he and his clerks had drawn up in 1835 (usually shortened to the GAEL). That notebook already carried a written-out definition for the matching character: honor by birth, kingly power by the line of Pharaoh, possessor of heaven and earth. Joseph read the definition back. The content Clayton recorded, the descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh who received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven and earth, is almost word for word what the GAEL already said.
One character, one lookup in a book on the shelf, yielding a single recycled sentence. A non-Mormon newspaperman named Sylvester Emmons watched it happen and described the method in plain terms:
"He compared them, in my presence, with his Egyptian Alphabet… and they are evidently the same characters."[7]
He compared them. Not he translated them, not he received them by revelation. There was no seer stone, no Urim and Thummim, no scribe assigned to take dictation. The tool was a secular notebook, the method was visual comparison, and the result was one sentence pulled from a definition already written down eight years earlier.
The most telling fact about the episode, though, is what did not happen next. The trail goes cold. No manuscript. No scribe. No published translation. No further mention of the plates in any sermon, letter, or revelation across the fourteen months Joseph had left to live before his murder at Carthage in June 1844. The Joseph Smith Papers editors, who have catalogued every surviving scrap Joseph produced, summarize it carefully:
"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."[8]
A non-Mormon eyewitness sharpens the picture. Charlotte Haven, a young woman from New Hampshire visiting Nauvoo, wrote home on May 2, 1843, about what she had seen. She had no reason to soften anything. By her account, when Joseph was shown the plates he said that the characters resembled those in 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."[9]
Read the grammar. He thought, by the help of revelation, he would be able to translate them if Moore left them with him: a guess, a future possibility, an admission that revelation had not yet come. This is a man saying he might be able to translate the plates if inspiration arrived, not a man announcing he has already translated them. The translation Haven half-expected, a "sequel to that holy book," never appeared.
Strip the framing away and the episode runs this way. Joseph engaged a forged document at face value, did not see through the hoax on contact, reached for a flawed reference notebook, matched one character, hoped a revelation might come, and let the matter drop when none did. The not-seeing-through-it part is a real limit on his discernment, and the Kinderhook episode article walks the day in full without softening it. What the record will not support is the thing the framing needs: a confident, sustained, revelatory translation.
"Two clunkers and a third car"
Having set up that thin 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. "After all, wouldn't you buy a third car from a man who had already sold you two clunkers?"[1:1]
The line is memorable, and it works only if the three projects are the same kind of thing. They are not. The real move underneath the metaphor is not an argument about any single case but an argument about a chain, with the weak links wired up to drag down the strong one. Knock out the wiring and the metaphor has nothing left to carry.
Start with what "translate" even meant to Joseph. A modern reader hears the word and pictures a scholar rendering a foreign language into English by linguistic skill. Joseph never claimed that. From the beginning, "translation" for him named producing scripture by the gift and power of God, and it took different shapes depending on the source.
Sometimes it meant text appearing as he looked into a seer stone (the Book of Mormon). Sometimes a physical artifact was the occasion for revealed text (the Book of Abraham). Sometimes there was no foreign source at all: his revision of the King James Bible reworked an English text he already had, with no ancient-language manuscript in front of him, and it still produced canonized scripture. Score a man against a standard he never adopted and the test is rigged before it starts.
Once the word is read the way Joseph used it, the three "translations" in the bundle fall into different buckets:
- The Kinderhook engagement was a non-event: one recycled sentence from a secular notebook, no scribe, no manuscript, dropped inside a week. There was never a sustained translation for the metaphor to point at.
- The Book of Abraham is a long-running scholarly debate, not a closed case. The surviving papyrus fragments do not match the text, which is granted plainly there, but the book also carries authentically ancient material Joseph had no ordinary way to know, and the question is genuinely contested.
- The Book of Mormon is a quarter-million-word dictation with the fullest witness record of the three, produced in the open with scribes watching 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 bundling argument article takes the used-car move apart piece by piece: what "translate" 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.
The third car is the best one in the lot
Now the part the bundle was never built to reach. Reverse the chain, order Joseph's projects by the strength of the evidence behind each, and the Book of Mormon does not sit at the doubtful end. It sits at the strong end, the best-attested production in his entire corpus.
Begin with the timeline, because it is the single hardest fact for any natural explanation to absorb. Working from the documentary record, John W. Welch reconstructed the dictation window as roughly April to late June of 1829, and once travel days and interruptions are subtracted, the actual translating fit into the equivalent of about 60 working days.[10] The text dictated in that window runs to 269,510 words, what became 588 printed pages in the 1830 edition. That implies a sustained pace near the upper limit of what a person can manage simply reading aloud from a finished book, hours a day, for two months. Joseph had no finished book to read from.
The method only deepens the problem. Royal Skousen's decades-long study of the surviving manuscript pages shows essentially a clean first draft: scribal slips, yes, but no substantive revisions, no reworking, no backtracking. Oral storytelling with rehearsal leaves traces of revision, and a memorized script leaves traces under the pressure of a 60-day sprint. The Original Manuscript leaves none.
Emma Smith, who took dictation and shared the room, put it simply: he had neither manuscript nor book to read from, and if he had, she could not have missed it. The Gospel Topics essay on the translation describes the scene openly:
"Joseph placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument."[11]
And the witnesses are not a footnote to the story; they are the spine of it. Three witnesses signed a published statement that they saw an angel and the plates. Eight more signed that they handled the plates with their own hands. They left the Church in tension at various points, quarreled with Joseph, and went their separate ways, yet not one of the eleven ever took back his testimony. The statements still print in the front of every copy of the book.
Then there is what the text contains, things no one in frontier New York in 1829 had access to:
- Chiasmus, the inverted Hebrew poetic structure, woven through the book, with Alma 36 standing as a seventeen-element pattern too tight to fall out by accident.
- Hebrew syntax bleeding through the English ("dreamed a dream," conditional clauses built the Hebrew way), densest in the unedited 1830 edition.
- Ancient names later pulled out of the ground. "Nahom," the burial place named in 1 Nephi 16:34 on the journey through Arabia, matches inscribed altars found in Yemen carrying the tribal name NHM, dated to before Lehi's time, sitting right where the text turns the party eastward toward the sea.[12] "Alma," once dismissed as wrong because it reads as a woman's name in English, turned up as an ancient Semitic man's name in documents excavated long after Joseph died, as did "Sariah," the name of Lehi's wife.
Each item stands on its own; together they form a pattern a forger could not have planned. And the clincher is biographical. Joseph lived fifteen more years and produced sermons, revelations, and other scripture, but he never produced a second sustained narrative on anything like the scale of the Book of Mormon. A literary gift large enough to invent it from nothing should have surfaced again. It never did.
What the trap caught
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 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.
That selectivity is itself the evidence. The same gift that stayed dormant before a forgery had, fourteen years earlier, produced the Book of Mormon: a sustained, internally consistent scripture, witnessed by people who never recanted and freighted with ancient detail the nineteenth century had no way to supply. The Kinderhook plates show what Joseph did with a fake. The Book of Mormon shows what he did with the real thing. The trap was set with care, and the answer to it is simply what Joseph did and did not do: he looked, he found nothing there, and he walked away.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims," pp. 72–73. ↩︎ ↩︎
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 ↩︎ ↩︎
Wilbur Fugate, letter to James T. Cobb, April 8, 1878 (formalized in a deposition signed June 30, 1879). Both items were published in Wilhelm Wyl, Mormon Portraits (Salt Lake City: Tribune Printing and Publishing Co., 1886). The full text reads in part: "Those plates are a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself. None of the nine persons who signed the certificate knew the secret… I know they are a humbug, for I helped to make them, with my own hands." ↩︎ ↩︎
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. ↩︎
William Clayton, journal entry, May 1, 1843. Published in George D. Smith, ed., An Intimate Chronicle: The Journals of William Clayton (Salt Lake City: Smith Research Associates / Smith-Pettit Foundation, 1995), 100. The original entry reads in the third person ("Prest J. has translated a portion") and was rewritten into first person by History of the Church compilers in the late nineteenth century. ↩︎
Sylvester Emmons (writing anonymously), letter published in the New York Herald, May 30, 1843. Emmons was the non-Mormon editor of the Nauvoo Neighbor and was present during the examination of the Kinderhook plates. His record: "He compared them, in my presence, with his Egyptian Alphabet… and they are evidently the same characters." For full citation context and the Herald publication details, see Bradley and Ashurst-McGee, "President Joseph Has Translated a Portion" (2020), and Sarah Allen, "FAIR's Letter for My Wife Rebuttal, Part 36," https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Letter_For_My_Wife/Part_36. ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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/. The standard scholarly reconstruction of the Book of Mormon translation timeline. 269,510-word total, ~60 working days, 10–20 wpm rate. ↩︎
"Book of Mormon Translation," Gospel Topics Essays, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics-essays/book-of-mormon-translation. The Church's official position on the translation method, including the seer-stone-in-hat method, eyewitness accounts, and the "gift and power of God" framing. ↩︎
BYU Book of Mormon Onomasticon, "Nahom," https://onoma.lib.byu.edu/index.php/NAHOM. NHM altars excavated at the Bar'an Temple in Marib, Yemen, dating to the 7th–8th century BC. See also S. Kent Brown, "'The Place That Was Called Nahom': New Light from Ancient Yemen," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 8, no. 1 (1999): 66–68. ↩︎