James Strang Comparison
The claim:
"James Strang and his claims are fascinating. He was basically Joseph Smith 2.0 — but with a twist. Like Joseph, Strang did the following:
- Claimed that he was visited by an angel who reserved plates for him to translate into the word of God. 'The record which was sealed from my servant Joseph. Unto thee it is reserved.'
- Received the 'Urim and Thummim'.
- Produced 11 witnesses who testified that they too had seen and inspected ancient metal plates.
- Introduced new scripture. After unearthing the plates (the same plates as Laban from whom Nephi took the brass plates in Jerusalem), Strang translated it into scripture called the 'Book of the Law of the Lord'.
- Established a new Church: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (Strangite). Its headquarters is still today in Voree, Wisconsin."[1]
"What does this say about the credibility of the Book of Mormon witnesses if they were so easily duped by James Strang and his claims of being a prophet called of God to bring forth new scripture from ancient plates only to later turn out to be a fraud?"[2]
Underneath that list the CES Letter is running a tidy little syllogism. Joseph Smith had witnesses who signed their names to metal plates. So did James Strang, a man who claimed to be Joseph's successor and who almost everyone now agrees was a fraud. If a pack of signed witnesses can be wrong about Strang's plates, then signed witnesses prove nothing about Joseph's. Knock out the witnesses and you knock out the Book of Mormon.
The fair place to begin is by granting the part that is true, because a fair amount of it is. There really was a James Strang. He really did claim an angel and metal plates, he really did gather men who signed affidavits that they had seen and handled those plates, and he really did go on to teach polygamy, crown himself king on an island in Lake Michigan, and end up assassinated by his own followers.[3] None of that is invented, and a faithful answer is not allowed to pretend Strang never existed. The surface really does rhyme.
But a parallel is only as good as the thing being compared, and the moment you stop looking at the witnesses and start looking at what the witnesses were testifying about, the two cases come apart in your hands. This page walks the comparison that actually matters. The broader question of whether the Book of Mormon witnesses were trustworthy people lives in Credibility Concerns; the question of what "spiritual eyes" meant when some of them used it lives in Second Sight. Here the question is narrower and, frankly, more interesting: put Strang's plates next to Joseph's and see which one survives a close look.
Start with what the plates produced
A witness, by himself, only tells you that he saw something. He cannot tell you whether the thing he saw was genuine. So the first and most testable question is not "did men sign their names" but "what came off these plates when they were translated." On that question the two cases are not in the same universe.
Strang dug up three small brass plates near Voree, Wisconsin, and translated them. The whole result is about two hundred words of gloomy poetry. The heart of it reads this way:
"My people are no more. The mighty are fallen, and the young slain in battle. Their bones bleached on the plain by the noonday shadow. The houses are levelled to the dust, and in the moat are the walls. They shall be inhabited."[4]
It closes a few lines later: "Record my words, and bury it in the Hill of Promise."[4:1] That is essentially the entire text. There are no real names, no story, no history, nothing that points to any actual ancient people. It reads like what a literate person in 1845 could knock out in an afternoon by imitating the cadence of the King James Bible.
Strang's second project was longer. From a separate set of eighteen plates he produced The Book of the Law of the Lord, an expansion of biblical commandments that grew from about 80 pages in 1851 to roughly 320 pages by 1856.[5] But notice the timeline: that was a decade of on-and-off translation work, and even then the total Strangite scripture comes out shorter than the book of Alma by itself.
Now set the Book of Mormon beside that. Joseph Smith dictated roughly 270,000 words of connected narrative, spanning many peoples across a thousand years, in about 65 working days, with no notes and no rewrites of the early pages as the later ones came.[6] And the text is not generic. Scholars have spent two centuries mapping its internal features: long passages built on the inverted A-B-B-A pattern of ancient Hebrew poetry called chiasmus, Hebrew sentence structures showing through the English, and place names like Nahom that were later found on the ground in the Arabian peninsula.[7] [8]
| Feature | Voree Plates | Book of the Law plates | Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Translation length | ~200-250 words | ~80 pages (1851); ~320 pages (1856) | ~270,000 words |
| Translation time | Single sitting | ~5-10 years | ~65 working days |
| Internal complexity | Generic four-stanza poem | Brief expansion of biblical commandment material | Multi-author narrative, chiasmus, Hebraisms, ancient names attested archaeologically |
| Subsequent revisions | None published | Multiple expansions 1851→1856 | No substantive revisions |
The witnesses on each side may sound alike. The texts do not. One side produced a paragraph of lament; the other produced a book that scholars still cannot explain in ordinary terms. The CES Letter's parallel asks you to weigh the signatures and ignore what the signatures point at, and what they point at is where the comparison comes apart.
The confessions came from inside Strang's own camp
One difference here should carry real weight, because it is the kind of evidence the CES Letter says is missing.
The CES Letter's strongest line is that no Strangite witness is known to have flatly denied his testimony. Read narrowly, that is even true for several of them. But "never formally signed a recantation" is a much smaller claim than it sounds, because the people closest to Strang left behind something the Book of Mormon corpus never produced: direct reports that the plates were faked, and the reports came from insiders, not outside enemies.
Three separate lines of confession survive, each reaching a different part of the forgery:
- Caleb Barnes, Strang's own law partner, reportedly described how he and Strang made the Voree Plates out of an old brass kettle, cut the lettering with a saw file, treated them with acid to look ancient, and buried them under a tree with a long auger so no digging would show.[9]
- Samuel Graham, who was both one of the seven witnesses and Strang's translation scribe, the same role Oliver Cowdery filled for Joseph, reportedly admitted that he and Strang made the plates by coating them with beeswax and cutting in the letters with a pen knife. He then left the island, taking Strang's first wife with him.[10]
- Samuel P. Bacon, another of the seven witnesses, was hauled before a Strangite council in 1855 and stripped of his office for calling the whole enterprise "human invention." That council action was recorded by Warren Post, himself a loyal Strangite apostle who had no motive to embarrass the movement.[11]
I will not oversell these. Two of the three come through ex-Strangites writing decades later, so they are secondhand, and faithful scholars acknowledge as much.[12] But two points still stand. The Bacon council action is contemporaneous and recorded by a friendly insider, not a defector, which is about as strong as this kind of evidence gets. And the asymmetry in number is the thing the parallel cannot survive: three separate insider lines alleging fabrication on the Strang side, and zero comparable reports across the eleven Book of Mormon witnesses across fifty years. No Book of Mormon scribe ever confessed to making plates with a file and acid. Nobody on the inside ever did.
What the witnesses did after they walked away
Grant the CES Letter its best version anyway. Set the three confessions aside entirely and assume not one Strangite witness ever denied a thing. The two groups still behave completely differently once their prophet is gone, and the difference is the whole point.
Strang's witnesses went quiet. After they left his church, they simply stopped testifying about the plates. They did not spend the rest of their lives insisting the Voree Plates were real. Some drifted to other churches, one "turned infidel," and the careful research into their later lives turns up no first-hand reaffirmations of the plates from any of them after they left.[12:1] Silence is what you would expect from a man who once signed a paper to please a charismatic leader and later wanted to forget it.
The Book of Mormon witnesses did the opposite, and they did it for half a century. After the bitter split with Joseph in 1838, when they had every reason to come clean and nothing left to protect, they kept being asked, by friends, by enemies, by journalists, on their deathbeds. And they kept giving the same answer. Not one of the eleven ever took it back. Credibility Concerns lays out the full record of more than two dozen separate reaffirmations across those fifty years. The contrast is not subtle:
| Pattern | Strangite witnesses | Book of Mormon witnesses |
|---|---|---|
| Insider fabrication-confession reports | 3 source lines (Barnes via Scott; Graham via Loomis; Bacon via Loomis + Warren Post) | 0 |
| Post-departure public reaffirmations | No documented first-hand reaffirmations after departure (Allen) | 26+ documented across 1838-1888 |
| Foundational text translation time | ~10 years (Plates of Laban) | ~65 working days |
| Foundational text length | ~320 pages (1856 final) | ~270,000 words / ~530 pages 1830 ed. |
"They never recanted" is a thin reed when the witnesses fall silent. It is a different thing entirely when the witnesses keep speaking, under oath, under hostility, for fifty years.
The Shaker book was a different kind of claim
The CES Letter adds a third comparison: a Shaker volume called A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book, published in 1843, which more than sixty people signed witness statements for. Sixty witnesses sounds like an even bigger problem than eleven. It is not, once you read what those witnesses actually said they saw.
The Book of Mormon's Eight Witnesses said they picked the plates up and turned the leaves over with their hands in ordinary daylight. The Shaker witnesses said something different. Their statement reads:
"We, the undersigned, hereby testify, that we saw the holy Angel standing upon the house-top, as mentioned in the foregoing declaration, holding the Roll and Book."[13]
They are testifying to seeing an angel hold a book on a rooftop. That is a vision, and nobody handled anything. The CES Letter lines this up against witnesses who hefted a metal object, as if the two are the same kind of testimony. They are not even the same category. And the Shaker book itself was not a translation off physical plates; it was a revelation a Shaker named Philemon Stewart said an angel dictated to him.
The endings differ too. Within a few decades the Shaker leadership quietly walked away from the Sacred Roll. They stopped using it, pulled it out of circulation, and grew embarrassed by it; one elder told a visiting journalist its "best use was to burn them," and the man who produced it was told to stop writing in the name of inspiration.[14] The Book of Mormon's witness testimony went the other way: it has been printed in the front of every single copy of the book since 1830, and the Church has never once disowned it. One book its own movement buried; the other its movement has carried for nearly two centuries.
The framework built backward
The weakness is not in any single fact above. It sits in the way faithful writers organize all of them, into a neat five-point checklist of differences (the artifact, the content, the witnesses, the lifelong testimony, the surviving church), which is a modern invention. Joseph and Oliver did not stand up in 1830 and say "you will know this is true because the plates weigh sixty pounds and the text contains chiasmus and our church will still be here in two centuries." That checklist was assembled by scholars more than a hundred years after Strang, and a fair critic can ask whether it was built backward, on purpose, to beat the Strang comparison.[15]
That deserves a straight answer, and the answer turns on a distinction. The packaging is modern; the facts inside the packaging are not. The 270,000 words existed in 1830 whether or not anyone listed length as a test. The witnesses kept testifying for fifty years whether or not anyone in 1830 predicted they would. Scholars organized the evidence late; they did not invent it.[16] A recent way of counting old facts is not the same as a new set of facts.
I will concede one more thing the CES Letter is partly right about, because ducking it would quietly stack the deck. At the moment of witnessing, the Book of Mormon group actually had more family ties to the prophet than Strang's did. Several of the Eight were Joseph's own father and brothers. One of Strang's witnesses, Phineas Wright, only became Strang's father-in-law years after he signed, so that tie came later.[17] If family relationship at the time of signing were the whole story, the CES Letter would have a point there. But family ties are not the load-bearing part of the case. The weight is carried by what the plates produced, by the confessions that came from inside Strang's camp, and by what each set of witnesses did across the decades that followed. On all three, the comparison runs the other way.
The witnesses weren't the whole case
For the Strang parallel to do its work, the witnesses have to be the only thing holding up the Book of Mormon, so that lining them up against Strang's witnesses topples the whole structure. But the witnesses were never the only support. They were pointing at an object.
The object is the difference the Strang parallel cannot close. Take a book away and leave only the men who swore to it, and yes, signatures alone cannot tell you whether plates were genuine or forged in a kitchen. That much is true for Strang, and it would be true for Joseph too if the Book of Mormon were two hundred words of borrowed lament. What Joseph actually produced was a sprawling, interlocking scripture, hundreds of pages dictated aloud over a couple of months and never reworked once it was down, that scholars are still failing to explain in ordinary terms two centuries later.[6:1] [18] Strang's plates yielded a single paragraph and then fell apart the day their king was shot. Joseph's yielded a book you can hold in your hands today.
The parallel holds right up until you ask what came out of the ground. Then it points the opposite direction from the one the CES Letter built it to point.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," p. 95. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," p. 99. ↩︎
"James Strang," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Strang. Documents Nauvoo conversion February 1844; Voree 1844-1848; Beaver Island 1848-1856; assassination June 16, 1856 (died July 9 at age 43); peak ~12,000 adherents; July 5, 1856 forced eviction of ~2,600 Strangites. ↩︎
The Voree Plates: The Record of Rajah Manchou of Vorito (public domain), via OpenScriptures: https://openscriptures.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Voree-Plates.pdf. Strang's full published "translation" — approximately 200-250 words. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Book of the Law of the Lord," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_the_Law_of_the_Lord. Eighteen brass plates, ~7⅜ x 9 inches, ~6 lbs; seven witnesses (Graham, Bacon, Post, Wright, Hosmer, Page, Savage); 1851 (80 pp) and 1856 (320 pp) editions; "none of them is known to have ever denied their testimony as given in the Book of the Law." ↩︎
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. Welch documents the ~65 working day translation window (April-June 1829) for the surviving ~270,000-word Book of Mormon manuscript; the 1828 work with Harris on the lost 116 pages is treated separately in the literature. ↩︎ ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies 10, no. 1 (1969). The foundational treatment of Hebraic chiastic structure in the Book of Mormon, including Alma 36. ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, Lehi and Sariah in Arabia: The Old World Setting of the Book of Mormon (Bountiful: Xlibris, 2015); Pearl of Great Price Central / Evidence Central entries on Nahom (NHM) altar inscriptions from the Bar'an temple, Marib, Yemen. ↩︎
Isaac Scott, letter to Joseph Smith III, The Saints' Herald 35 (December 29, 1888): 831-32. The Caleb Barnes confession is reported through Scott — an RLDS-affiliated ex-Strangite by the time of the letter, 32 years after Strang's death. Cited and excerpted in FAIR's master Strang page; Daniel C. Peterson, "Defending the Faith: The Story Behind James Strang and His Sect," Deseret News, June 9, 2011. ↩︎
Chauncy Loomis, letter to Joseph Smith III, "Experience on Beaver Island with James J. Strang," The Saints' Herald (November 10, 1888): 718-719. Loomis reports Graham's beeswax-and-pen-knife confession and Bacon's discovery of plate fragments behind Strang's ceiling. Loomis was an ex-Strangite writing in the RLDS publication 32 years after Strang's death. ↩︎
Warren Post journal record of the 1855 Strangite council that stripped Samuel P. Bacon of his office after Bacon "denied the work being done was the inspiration of God" and called it "human invention." Discussed in FAIR's master Strang page and Saints Unscripted's "Did James Strang's Witnesses Deny Their Testimonies?"; also referenced in Daniel C. Peterson's broader treatment of the Strang witness corpus. ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 50," FAIR Blog (March 2, 2022). Documents the Voree Plates fabrication chain; Strangite witnesses' post-departure silence ("they all abruptly stopped testifying of Strang's plates"); current ~300 Strangite members. Concedes the secondhand status of the Scott letter: "This is a secondhand account from 1888, 32 years after Strang's death... I am not stating it as settled fact." ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Witnesses," "Problems" 7, pp. 103-104, citing A Holy, Sacred and Divine Roll and Book, p. 304, and The Braden and Kelly Debate, p. 173. ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 53," FAIR Blog (March 16, 2022). Documents the Shaker leadership's later effective de-canonization of the Sacred Roll; "best use was to burn them"; the book "faded into the background"; Stewart marginalized and told to cease writing "in the line of Inspiration"; Mark D. Thomas's AAS Proceedings on the Ministry's "did not represent a true revelation" determination. ↩︎
The 137-162 year gap between Strang's challenge (1844-45) and Anderson's Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses (1981) / Peterson's "Tangible Restoration" (2006) raises a legitimate question: did the framework get retrofitted to defeat a challenge the original three-element framework (witnesses + plates + non-recantation) couldn't handle? The honest answer requires distinguishing the articulation of the framework into its modern five-element structure (which is post-Strang) from the features the framework points to (which are documented in contemporaneous 1829-1888 primary sources). Modern scholarship organizes contemporaneous evidence into selection criteria; it does not invent the evidence. ↩︎
Daniel C. Peterson, "Tangible Restoration: The Witnesses and What They Experienced," 2006 FAIR Conference. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/2006-Daniel-Peterson.pdf. Foundational scholarly statement of the structural-asymmetry framework. Concludes "forgery is the virtually certain explanation" for the Strang plates. ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal — Part 52," FAIR Blog (March 10, 2022). Documents Strangite witness biographies and the post-departure silence pattern; notes that Strang married one of Phineas Wright's daughters four years after Wright signed the Book of the Law witness statement (making Strang the son-in-law). ↩︎
Royal Skousen, Book of Mormon Critical Text Project (FARMS / Interpreter Foundation, 2001-2025). Multi-volume critical text edition documenting the dictation pattern, original manuscript features, and textual integrity. ↩︎