Credibility Concerns
The claim:
"All of the Book of Mormon witnesses, except Martin Harris, were related by blood or marriage either to the Smiths or Whitmers... Mark Twain made light of this obvious problem: '...I could not feel more satisfied and at rest if the entire Whitmer family had testified.'"[1]
"Within eight years, all of the Three Witnesses were excommunicated from the Church. This is what Joseph Smith said about them in 1838: 'Such characters as... John Whitmer, David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris, are too mean to mention; and we had liked to have forgotten them.'"[2]
Eleven men signed their names to a statement that they had seen the gold plates Joseph Smith said he translated the Book of Mormon from. That testimony has been printed in the front of every copy of the book since 1830. The CES Letter spends twenty pages trying to take it apart. Boiled down, the argument is that these eleven cannot be trusted: they believed in folk magic and treasure-digging, most of them were related to Joseph, Martin Harris was a religious flake, and all three of the main witnesses were eventually kicked out of the Church Joseph led. Men like that, the argument goes, will say they saw a miracle whether they did or not.
Let me start with what is true in that, because a fair amount of it is true, and a faithful answer that hides the hard parts has not earned your trust. The witnesses really did come out of a folk-magic world. Most of them really were Joseph's relatives. Martin Harris really did drift through several religious movements after leaving. And all three of the Three Witnesses really were excommunicated, and Joseph really did call them "too mean to mention." None of that is invented. This article states it plainly.
What the CES Letter does is take those real facts and stop there, as if the story ended in 1838 when the witnesses fell out with Joseph. It did not. The strongest part of the witness evidence is everything that happened after the partnership broke up, when these men no longer had any reason to protect Joseph and every reason to come clean if they had been faking. They were asked, over and over, by friends and enemies, for the next fifty years. Not one of them ever took it back. Put that record back in, and the case the CES Letter is selling falls apart.
Worth Acknowledging
The folk-magic backgrounds are real. The family relationships are exactly what the CES Letter says they are. The Three Witnesses were all excommunicated. Martin Harris did associate with several religious movements. Stephen Burnett's 1838 letter is a genuine contemporaneous source. Faithful scholarship does not contest any of these facts. The disagreement is whether they add up to fabrication, or whether the full record points the other way.
Two very different kinds of witness
The first thing the CES Letter blurs is that there were not one but two groups of witnesses, and they testified to two completely different things.
The Three Witnesses (Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris) described a vision: an angel showed them the plates, and they heard the voice of God. That is a religious experience, and a skeptic has room to argue about religious experiences.
The Eight Witnesses described something with no angel and no voice at all. Joseph simply handed them the plates, in ordinary daylight, and they turned the leaves over in their hands. Their signed statement from 1830 reads like a description of an object on a table:
"...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, and of curious workmanship... for we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken."[3]
Handle. Saw. Hefted. Appearance. Engravings. There is nothing mystical in that language. The Latter-day Saint scholar Daniel Peterson notes that the Eight Witnesses' testimony is "stubbornly matter-of-fact" and "almost distinctly nonreligious in tone."[4] This is the part of the evidence the CES Letter least wants to talk about, because "they had superstitious imaginations" is an answer to a vision. It is not an answer to a man telling you he held a heavy metal book in his hands in his own kitchen.
What folk magic can and cannot explain
That distinction carries more weight than it first appears, because it goes to the heart of the CES Letter's best argument.
The serious version of the critique (made by historians like D. Michael Quinn, not just the CES Letter) is not that these men were liars. It is subtler: people raised in a folk-magic world, who believed a neighbor could find buried treasure with a divining rod, were primed to interpret a strange event in supernatural terms. Show such a person a shiny object after a religious ritual, the argument runs, and their imagination fills in an angel.
That argument has real force against a vision. It has almost none against the Eight Witnesses. A magical worldview might shape how you describe a flash of light. It does not invent specific dimensions, a specific weight, and the engineering of the binding. And specific is exactly what the Eight gave. John Whitmer, interviewed in 1878, said the plates were "8 by 6 or 7 inches," very heavy, bound with "three rings, each one in the shape of a D." Asked point-blank whether they were a real physical object, he answered, "Yes, as material as anything can be."[5] Believing your neighbor can dowse for gold does not put a "D-shaped ring" in your memory. That is the report of a man describing a thing he handled.
The historian Richard Lloyd Anderson gathered ten separate statements from the Eight Witnesses describing this kind of physical handling. Not one of them uses "vision" or "spiritual eye" language. All ten describe an examination you could do with your hands.[6] The CES Letter engages none of these. It treats the Eight as if they were invisible, or as mere echoes of the Three, because the moment you let them speak, the "superstitious imagination" theory has nothing to grab onto.
They had every reason to recant, and never did
Now to the heart of it. The CES Letter's whole emotional pull comes from the falling-out: all three of the Three Witnesses were excommunicated within eight years, and Joseph said cruel things about them. The reader is meant to picture three bitter men walking away in disgust.
So picture it squarely. These men left angry. They lost their standing, their friends, in some cases their property. Joseph publicly trashed them. If they had only gone along with the gold-plates story to please him, this is the exact moment a normal person comes clean. Recanting was the cheap and obvious way out, and it was sitting right there. A liar takes it. Someone who actually saw something does not, even when staying costs him.
None of the eleven ever took it back. Not one, across fifty years of being asked.
Look at the three men who had the most reason to talk.
Oliver Cowdery spent his years after leaving practicing law in Ohio and Wisconsin, a profession where a known liar has no career. If he wanted to bury the Book of Mormon, that was the time and place. Instead, when he returned to the Church in 1848, he stood up in a public meeting and said, "I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages) as it fell from the lips of the Prophet... I beheld with my eyes, and handled with my hands, the gold plates from which it was translated."[7] He died affirming it in 1850.
David Whitmer is the cleanest case of all, because he never came back. He lived the last fifty years of his life as a respected non-Mormon businessman in Richmond, Missouri, with no church to please and every incentive to debunk Joseph if he could. He did the opposite, again and again. When a newspaper claimed in 1880 that he had backed away from his testimony, he published a public proclamation correcting it: "I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof."[8] Three days before his death in 1888, he called his family and his doctor to his bed and said "the Bible and the record of the Nephites (Book of Mormon), are true, so you can say that you have heard me bear my testimony on my death bed."[9]
One detail about Whitmer the CES Letter cannot absorb. His neighbors in Richmond were not Mormons. They were the town's bankers, judges, and merchants, people with no stake whatsoever in the Book of Mormon, who had simply watched this man live among them for forty-three years. In 1881 a group of them signed a public statement vouching for his "undoubted truth and veracity."[10] That is the man the CES Letter calls unstable and superstitious, described by the people best positioned to have caught him in a lie.
Martin Harris, the supposed flake, came back to the Church in 1870 at age 87, after more than thirty years away, and spent his last five years reaffirming what he saw. On his deathbed in 1875 he said, "Just as sure as you see the Sun shining, just as sure am I that I stood in the presence of an Angel of God."[11]
Steven C. Harper, who studied the whole body of evidence, concluded that "the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence" supports the witnesses' published testimonies.[12] When you count the dated reaffirmations in the historical record, you get a striking number: across the fifty years from 1838 to 1888, the eleven witnesses publicly restated their testimony at least twenty-six separate times. They took it back zero times. The CES Letter's "they all left the Church" framing only works if you look at the year they left and refuse to read any of the years that followed.
Key Point
Non-retraction is a fair bar to judge them by, because fabricators recant when the partnership dissolves. Across fifty years, eleven witnesses, hostile interrogations, mob violence, and excommunications, the 1830 testimony was never withdrawn by any of them. Many also actively reaffirmed it. Two of the three principal witnesses returned to the Church; the third defended his testimony in print and on his deathbed without ever returning.
The letter the CES Letter leans on
There is one piece of evidence the CES Letter treats as its trump card, and it deserves a straight answer, because at first glance it looks like a witness admitting the whole thing was imaginary.
In 1838, a disaffected Mormon named Stephen Burnett wrote a letter saying he had heard Martin Harris state "in public that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination," and that the Eight Witnesses "never saw them" either. It is contemporary, it is from an insider, and it sounds devastating.
Two things gut it.
First, look at who Burnett was and what else is in that letter. He was leaving the Church and announcing his own departure on the very same page, and in the same letter he calls Joseph Smith and Sidney Rigdon "notorious liars." On the Eight Witnesses specifically, he is not even a firsthand source: he is reporting what he heard Harris (who was not one of the Eight) say about what the Eight supposedly said. That is thirdhand. And the Eight themselves flatly contradicted it in their own words, often within months. John Whitmer, two years before Burnett wrote, said "I have most assuredly seen the plates from whence the book of Mormon is translated, and that I have handled these plates."[13] Hyrum Smith, hearing the same "spiritual eyes" rumor in 1838, answered it head-on: "He said he had but two hands and two eyes. He said he had seen the plates with his eyes and handled them with his hands."[14] Two hands and two eyes, not spiritual ones. That reads like a man swatting down the exact rumor Burnett was spreading.
Second, and this is the part that does the most damage, the CES Letter quotes half of Burnett's own sentence and drops the other half. In that same meeting, by Burnett's own account, Harris stood up and said this:
"M Harris arose & said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon for he knew it was true. He said he had hefted the plates repeatedly in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them, but he never saw them only as he saw a city through a mountain."[15]
Read the whole thing and Harris is describing two different periods. The "city through a mountain" line is about the months he spent helping during the translation, when the plates stayed covered with a cloth and he could feel their weight but not look at them directly. That is not the famous vision at all. The vision, where an angel showed the uncovered plates, came later, and Harris described that event in plain, unmistakable terms his entire life. The CES Letter takes a quote about the covered-plates period and presents it as Harris confessing the whole experience was imaginary. His own next breath, "he knew it was true," is left on the cutting-room floor.
The most thorough study of this letter, by Neal Rappleye and Stephen Smoot in 2024, ran it through a standard historical-reliability checklist and scored it 3 out of 10: not a reliable source. They put the point bluntly, that to prefer "Burnett's thirdhand hearsay testimony over the direct, unambiguous testimonies of the Eight Witnesses themselves" is "nothing short of historiographical malpractice."[16] That does not mean Burnett was lying about everything. It means the one document the CES Letter rests the most weight on cannot carry it.
Was Martin Harris a religious flake?
The CES Letter's other big move is to paint Martin Harris as gullible: a man who changed religions five times and chased every new movement that came along, including a trip to England for the rival prophet James Strang. Put that way, his testimony looks like the enthusiasm of a man who would believe anything.
But watch what Harris actually did inside each of those movements, because the pattern is the opposite of gullible. Wherever he went, he kept testifying of the Book of Mormon specifically, and he refused to transfer that conviction to anyone else's claims. The Strang trip is the clearest example. The Latter-day Saint historian Robin Jensen documented it: Harris was supposed to be preaching Strang's movement, but he spent the trip bearing witness of the Book of Mormon instead, and his own sponsors sent him home after less than two months precisely because he would not preach Strangism. They complained he was "ashamed of his profession as a Strangite."[17] A man who would believe anything does not get fired from a movement for refusing to sell it. Most of the groups Harris looked into were Restoration offshoots, each claiming to be the true continuation of what Joseph started. He was not abandoning the Book of Mormon for them; he was checking which one had kept it. His anchor never moved in fifty years. The fuller treatment of the "five religions" charge is in the in-depth version.
The spot with real teeth
It is the one place I want to be careful not to oversell.
The conceded facts genuinely do reach the Three Witnesses' vision more than they reach anything else. The Three described an angel and a heavenly voice, and a few of David Whitmer's late-in-life statements do wrap that experience in spiritual language, saying things like the witnesses were "overshadowed" by the power of God when they saw the plates. A skeptic is not crazy to push hardest right there, on the visionary experience of men who came from a world that expected visions. If the witness case rested only on the Three Witnesses' vision, it would be a genuinely harder argument to make.
I am not going to wave that away. What I will say is that it is the narrower target, not the whole. The vision is the part the "magical imagination" theory can reach. The rest of the structure sits outside its reach entirely: the Eight Witnesses' plain physical handling, which involved no vision at all; the fifty years of refusing to recant after the men had every reason to; David Whitmer's non-Mormon neighbors vouching for his good name; and the simple fact that no naturalistic theory has ever explained the whole picture at once. Even Dan Vogel, one of the most serious critical historians, gave up the idea that the witnesses were lying. His view is that they sincerely experienced something.[18] Once a leading critic concedes the witnesses were sincere, the argument has quietly moved a long way from "you cannot trust these men."
They left and kept testifying
Step back and the CES Letter's case turns out to argue against itself. It builds everything on the moment the witnesses broke with Joseph, on the assumption that men who leave in anger will tell the truth on their way out. But that is exactly what these men did not do. They left, they stayed gone in some cases for decades, they had every worldly reason to debunk the whole thing, and instead they kept saying, to friends and enemies and journalists and on their deathbeds, that they had seen and handled the plates.
In the end it comes down to a count. Among eleven men asked the same question for fifty years, through excommunication, mob violence, lawsuits, and the death of nearly everyone they loved, there stand twenty-six recorded reaffirmations of the 1830 testimony and zero formal retractions. Not one of the eleven ever walked it back. That is the ledger the CES Letter's portrait has to balance, and it cannot.
And underneath the witnesses sits the thing they were testifying about. The Book of Mormon is the most testable object the Restoration produced: a roughly 270,000-word text dictated in about sixty working days, with no notes and no rewrites, and a complexity that has only become better documented since the last witness died.[19] The witnesses are not asking you to trust their characters in a vacuum. They are pointing you to a book you can pick up and examine for yourself, and telling you they held its source in their hands. When the credibility question gets hard, that is the fact no naturalistic theory has managed to explain.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," "Problems" 2, pp. 101-102. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," "Problems" 3, p. 102. ↩︎
"The Testimony of Eight Witnesses," Book of Mormon (Palmyra: E.B. Grandin, 1830), [589]. The original 1830 published statement printed in every edition since. ↩︎
Daniel C. Peterson, "The Book of Mormon Witnesses and Their Challenge to Secularism," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 27 (2017): vii-xxviii. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/the-book-of-mormon-witnesses-and-their-challenge-to-secularism. Peterson develops the Habermas hallucination argument and engages the conspiracy and forged-plates theories systematically. ↩︎
P. Wilhelm Poulson, interview with John Whitmer, July 1878, Deseret Evening News, August 6, 1878 (citing Poulson's letter to the editors dated July 31, 1878). Reproduced in Vogel, Early Mormon Documents, 5:243-247. Whitmer described the plates as "8 by 6 or 7 inches," "very heavy" (consistent with gold density), with "three rings, each one in the shape of a D"; when asked if the plates were "a material substance," Whitmer answered: "Yes, as material as anything can be." ↩︎
Richard Lloyd Anderson, "Attempts to Redefine the Experience of the Eight Witnesses," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 1 (2005): 18-31, 125-127. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol14/iss1/4/. Anderson documents ten separate statements from the Eight Witnesses describing physical handling of the plates. ↩︎
Reuben Miller, journal, October 21, 1848. Miller recorded Cowdery's reaffirmation at Kanesville (Council Bluffs), Iowa. Cowdery was rebaptized November 12, 1848. Cited in Faulring, "The Return of Oliver Cowdery." ↩︎
David Whitmer, "A Proclamation," Richmond Conservator, March 24, 1881. Reprinted in Cook, David Whitmer Interviews, 76, and in B.H. Roberts, A New Witness for God (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1895), 2:265-266. ↩︎
"David Whitmer's Last Hours and Testimony," Latter Day Saints Millennial Star 50, no. 9 (Feb. 27, 1888): 139-140; see also B.H. Roberts, A New Witness for God (Salt Lake City: George Q. Cannon & Sons, 1895), 2:296. Whitmer's full statement: "Now, you must all be faithful in Christ. I want to say to you all that the Bible and the record of the Nephites (Book of Mormon), are true, so you can say that you have heard me bear my testimony on my death bed." ↩︎
"A Statement of Citizens of Richmond, Mo.," 1881 broadside. Reprinted in Cook, David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness, 219. Prominent non-Mormon residents of Richmond, Missouri attested to Whitmer's "undoubted truth and veracity." ↩︎
William Pilkington Affidavit, April 3, 1934, recounting Harris's deathbed statement: "Just as sure as you see the Sun shining, just as sure am I that I stood in the presence of an Angel of God." Pilkington was a young man who attended Harris in 1875 and recorded the testimony in his 1934 sworn affidavit. ↩︎
Steven C. Harper, "The Eleven Witnesses," in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon, ed. Dennis L. Largey, Andrew H. Hedges, John Hilton III, and Kerry Hull (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2015), 117-132. https://rsc.byu.edu/coming-forth-book-mormon/eleven-witnesses. Harper concludes "the overwhelming preponderance of the evidence" supports the witnesses' published testimonies (p. 128). ↩︎
John Whitmer, "Address to the Patrons of the Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate," Latter Day Saints' Messenger and Advocate 2, no. 5 (March 1836): 286-287. Full quote: "I have most assuredly seen the plates from whence the book of Mormon is translated, and that I have handled these plates, and know of a surety that Joseph Smith, jr. has translated the book of Mormon by the gift and power of God." ↩︎
Sally Parker to John Kempton, August 26, 1838. Quoted in Steven C. Harper, "The Eleven Witnesses," The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon (Provo, UT: Religious Studies Center, 2015). Parker's letter records Hyrum Smith's response to dissenters' "spiritual eyes" claims: "He said he had but two hands and two eyes. He said he had seen the plates with his eyes and handled them with his hands." ↩︎
Stephen Burnett to "Br. Johnson," April 15, 1838, Joseph Smith Letterbook 2, p. 64. The full Harris correction passage: "M Harris arose & said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon for he knew it was true. He said he had hefted the plates repeatedly in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them, but he never saw them only as he saw a city through a mountain." ↩︎
Neal Rappleye and Stephen O. Smoot, "Stephen Burnett versus the Eight Witnesses: An Exercise in Mature Historical Thinking," Religious Educator 25, no. 2 (2024). https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-25-no-2-2024/stephen-burnett-versus-eight-witnesses. The article applies Sweat and Alford's five-factor source-evaluation framework to Burnett's letter and rates it 3/10 — "not a reliable source." Rappleye and Smoot conclude: to give "singular emphasis or preference to Burnett's thirdhand hearsay testimony over the direct, unambiguous testimonies of the Eight Witnesses themselves or those close to them (including immediate family) is nothing short of historiographical malpractice." ↩︎
Robin Scott Jensen, "A Witness in England: Martin Harris and the Strangite Mission," BYU Studies 44, no. 3 (2005): 79-98. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-witness-in-england-martin-harris-and-the-strangite-mission. Documents Harris's England trip with Strang (October-December 1846), the Birmingham/Manchester/Liverpool Book of Mormon affirmations, Lester Brooks's decision to send Harris home, and the broader pattern of Harris affirming the Book of Mormon while refusing to preach Strangism. ↩︎
Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004). Vogel's "pious fraud" thesis: Joseph Smith believed himself called to bring forth a sacred record by whatever means and the witnesses experienced something genuine within a visionary framework Joseph cultivated. ↩︎
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 60-65 working-day timeline is the consensus scholarly figure for the translation period (April-June 1829, with the bulk of the dictation in May-June 1829). ↩︎