Witnesses
Open any copy of the Book of Mormon and, near the front, you will find two short statements signed by ordinary men of Joseph Smith's day. They are the Book of Mormon witnesses: eleven people, besides Joseph, who declared in print that they had seen the gold plates he said he translated. Their names have been printed with the book since 1830. The CES Letter argues that these men should not be believed, that their testimony was a delusion or something they only imagined.
So start with what became of them. Three of the eleven were later excommunicated. Several fell out with Joseph so badly that they passed years as his declared enemies.
Reporters, skeptics, and their own relatives pressed all of them about the plates for the rest of their lives, much of it after they had left the Church and stood to gain nothing by holding firm. In half a century, not one of them took his name back.
That record is why the CES Letter spends roughly twenty pages here, close to a fifth of its length. The section opens, oddly, by calling the witnesses irrelevant, "because Joseph did not use the gold plates for translating the Book of Mormon."[1] Having said they do not matter, it then spends twenty pages arguing against them. You do not give a fifth of a document to refuting something that does not matter.
The order it puts things in
Notice what comes first. Three full pages on treasure-digging, divining rods, peep stones, and the "magical worldview" of early New England arrive before any witness gets to speak.[2] So the testimony, when it finally arrives, reaches you through a folder already labeled superstitious money-diggers.
But folk belief was ordinary in 1820s America, the way the family Bible on the shelf was ordinary. Showing that these men came from a world where visions were common talk establishes only what was unremarkable around them. It says nothing about where the testimony they then repeated for the rest of their lives actually came from: that culture, or the event they described.
Two groups, two experiences
The witnesses were never a single group. They came in two sets, and the two sets testified to very different things.
The first group, the Three Witnesses, were Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris. They told of a vision: an angel came down, a voice spoke from heaven, and the plates were turned leaf by leaf in heavenly light. A doubter can wave that off as a burst of religious feeling among men who were already hoping for it.
The Eight Witnesses reported something altogether different. Their 1830 statement is flat and matter-of-fact. They picked the plates up, turned the leaves themselves, and looked at the engravings in broad daylight, with no angel and no voice mentioned anywhere:
"Joseph Smith, Jun., the Author and Proprietor of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work."[3]
The dryness is the whole point. The scholar Daniel Peterson observes that the experience of the Eight "involves no glory, nothing miraculous. It is as mundane as anything can be." A plain daylight handling like that gives a hallucination theory nothing to grip.[4]
This split is where the whole effort stalls. Any explanation built for the Three, who reported a vision, has nothing to say about eight men handling a heavy object in daylight. Any explanation built for the Eight has nothing to say about the angel the Three reported. To dismiss the witnesses you would need one theory that covers both at once, and no such theory has ever been offered.
So the CES Letter mixes the two groups together and argues against the blur. The credibility case, built from money-digging and family ties, presses on the men's character but never delivers that one explanation.
"They only saw with spiritual eyes"
A narrower move grants that the witnesses said something but changes what they meant by it. A small set of "second sight" remarks gets stacked against a lifetime of straightforward statements, to hint that "spiritual eye" was just a courteous word for imagination.[5]
Two problems sink it. Those few remarks come mostly through enemies, reported late and at second hand, and nearly all of them trace back to the Three, while the spiritual-eye reading never reaches the Eight at all. Lifting a heavy object and turning its pages is not the kind of thing a person does in his imagination. The witnesses said as much. When one man recast Martin Harris's account as nothing but a vision, Harris rose in the meeting to set him straight.[6]
And the record the argument has to overturn is not nine handpicked lines. It is more than two hundred recorded affirmations across their lifetimes.[6:1] David Whitmer reaffirmed his on his deathbed in 1888.[7] Martin Harris, ninety-two and a day from death, said he had seen and handled the plates, and that denying them was the one thing that could have made him rich.[8]
"Anyone can produce witnesses"
The last move is to point at a rival. If James Strang produced witnesses to his own metal plates, the reasoning goes, then witness testimony is cheap and proves nothing.[9] The resemblance is real, and faithful scholars grant it freely. But the Strang comparison turns over under examination.
Strang's plates yielded about two hundred words of generic poetry, against the Book of Mormon's quarter-million-word text. And one side produced a confession of fabrication: Strang's own scribe was later reported to have admitted that the two of them made the plates themselves. The Book of Mormon side, after eleven witnesses and fifty years, produced no such scribe, no insider, no confession at all.
So look squarely at the thing the section works to keep out of focus. People let go of a costly lie the moment they stop believing it. What you do not see is a man clinging to an invented story for fifty years after it has already taken his good name, his friendships, and his church. Yet that is what all eleven did, every one of them with the door to recant standing open.
And remember what they were pointing at. Their testimony does not float free. It is fastened to the Book of Mormon, an actual book a reader can pick up,[10] and the eleven tie that book to a real object they said they lifted and turned in their own hands. What the section strains to talk you past is no private feeling, but plates handled in daylight and a printed record anyone can still hold. The three articles below walk through the rest, the difficult corners included.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," p. 85. The section opens by declaring the witnesses "irrelevant" because "Joseph did not use the gold plates for translating the Book of Mormon," then spends roughly twenty pages (pp. 85–105) arguing they cannot be trusted. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," pp. 85–88. ↩︎
"The Testimony of Eight Witnesses," printed in the Book of Mormon since the 1830 first edition. The statement is empirical throughout: "Joseph Smith, Jun., the Author and Proprietor of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon, all of which has the appearance of ancient work." No angel or vision appears in the account. ↩︎
Daniel C. Peterson, "Tangible Restoration: The Witnesses and What They Experienced," 2006 FAIR Conference (updated version published in Interpreter 29 [2018]: 15–62). Peterson observes that the experience of the Eight "involves no glory, nothing miraculous. It is as mundane as anything can be," and that a single naturalistic explanation cannot account for the two very different kinds of experience the Three and the Eight reported. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," pp. 93–94. ↩︎
Richard Lloyd Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1981), remains the standard documentary study, cataloging the witnesses' more than two hundred recorded affirmations across their lifetimes. On the Eight specifically, see Anderson, "Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 18–31, which catalogs ten post-1830 Eight-Witnesses statements, all describing physical handling and none using "spiritual eye" or "in vision" language, and documents John Whitmer's 1878 interview (forty years after he left the Church) giving dimensions and weight. Oliver Cowdery returned to the Church in 1848 and died affirming his testimony in March 1850. Martin Harris's standing-up correction of a misreported testimony is recorded in the same body of late-life accounts. ↩︎ ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO, 1887), which states, "I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof," even as the CES Letter cites the same booklet as evidence of his apostasy. His deathbed reaffirmation, made January 22, 1888, three days before his death, to family and his attending non-Mormon physician Dr. George W. Buchanan, is recorded in "David Whitmer's Last Hours and Testimony," Latter-day Saints' Millennial Star 50, no. 9 (February 27, 1888): 139–140. ↩︎
Harris's July 1875 deathbed statements in Clarkston, Cache County, Utah (he was 92 and died July 10, 1875) are multi-sourced (William Pilkington, George Godfrey, Edward Stevenson, and others) and converge on physical seeing and handling of the plates. Godfrey records Harris saying that had he been willing to perjure himself he "could have been a rich man." See Anderson, Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (1981), 110–116, and Daniel C. Peterson, "Tangible Restoration" (2006), 17–19. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," pp. 95–99 (James Strang's Voree plates) and pp. 103–104 (the Shaker Sacred Roll parallel). ↩︎
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 documents the roughly 65 working-day translation window (April–June 1829) for the surviving ~270,000-word Book of Mormon manuscript. ↩︎