The following was first published in the Mormonism Researched in May-June 2025. This is a free publication produced by Mormonism Research Ministry. To get a free subscription of the bimonthly newsletter, visit the website here.
On the official website of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, there is a short essay/article simply titled “Gold Plates.” The article states, “Joseph’s preface and a testimonial written by a group of eight witnesses described the plates as having an “appearance of gold,” arguing that “the Book of Mormon authors simply said they engraved their writings on ‘plates,’” without specifying the metal on which the characters were written. This overlooks the fact that it was the angel Moroni himself who told Smith that the plates were “gold plates” (Joseph Smith History 1:34).
On the back of a church produced picture of the plates, it says, “The Book of Mormon, translated from plates of gold….” The article on the back of the photo goes on to say “Mormon abridged the Nephite record on thin sheets of gold” (© 1997 by the Intellectual Reserve, Inc.).
The article states that
“witnesses later left statements that detailed the plates’ material composition, weight, dimensions, thickness, and binding. The plates weighed about ‘forty to sixty’ pounds, and together were between four and six inches thick. The leaves measured about ‘six’ or ‘seven inches wide by eight inches in length’ and individually had the thickness ‘of plates of tin.’”
A footnote points the reader to Joseph Smith’s description in the Times and Seasons newspaper, March 1, 1842, page 707. A similar description is also found in the History of the Church 4:537.
The article goes on to state that “according to one witness, there was a sealant securing ‘about the half of the book’ from tampering. This sealed portion made it impossible to separate the leaves and ‘appeared as solid as wood.’” The source for this is from an interview that Book of Mormon “Witness” David Whitmer gave to P. Wilhelm Poulson that was published in the August 16, 1878 edition of the Deseret Evening News.
In that interview Whitmer did not use the word “sealant.” When Poulson asked Whitmer “Did the angel turn all the leaves before you as you looked on it?” Whitmer said, “No, not at all, only that part of the book which was not sealed, and what there was sealed appeared as solid to my view as wood.”
Many images used by the church show the bottom plates with what appears to be two metal bands around the plates. In these images the bottom portion of the plates appear to lie flat, giving an appearance of what almost looks like a solid block of metal, or in the case of Whitmer, a solid block of wood. The picture provided with the article makes it appear that the bottom plates were wrapped in some unknown brown colored material.
The paragraph ends by saying “Joseph Smith derived his translation from the loose leaves of the plates.” This, Latter-day Saints have been told, would be the top two inches of the six-inch-deep set.
The article continues, “Based on these parameters, modern researchers have estimated plates of pure gold would weigh at least 45 kilograms (100 pounds) and might be too soft for engraved characters.”
This 100 pound assumption is very misleading. In their book, Seven Claims for the Book of Mormon, LDS Apostle John A. Widtsoe and Franklin S. Harris, conceded that “a cube of solid gold of that size, if the gold were pure, would weigh 200 pounds, which would be a heavy weight for a man to carry, even though he were of the athletic type of Joseph Smith” (37).
To understand how this article arrived at 100 pounds, one has to have access to the footnoted book edited by John W. Welch titled Reexploring the Book of Mormon. In his chapter titled “The ‘Golden’ Plates,” Robert F. Smith recounts how Joseph Smith
“managed to knock down and elude several pursuers” as he carried the plates home from where they were hidden. He states that “despite the weight of the plates” the young Joseph might have carried the plates “like a football.” (275).
While referencing Smith’s 2-page chapter in Reexploring, we see how the website article makes it appear that the plates, if made of pure gold, would only weigh 100 pounds. Smith, like other LDS apologists, turned to LDS metallurgist Read H. Putnam (1918-2014). In Putnam’s September, 1969 Improvement Era article titled “Were the Golden Plates made of Tumbaga?” he, like Widtsoe, conceded that “a solid block of gold 288 cubic inches [based on the measurements given by Joseph Smith] would weigh a little over 200 pounds.”
However, argued Putnam, if the plates were made of tumbaga, a central American alloy composed of 8 karat gold (33%), he surmised the plates could have been as light as 53 pounds, but only if the entire set of plates had a 50% air gap between each plate!
The “Gold Plates” website article contains far too many theories and guesses to be convincing. If you think Smith could have wielded 53-pound plates like a football, I invite you to lift our 53-pound set of plates at the Utah Christian Research Center, 579 W. Galena Park Place, in Draper Utah.