By Eric Johnson

Note: The following was originally printed in the July/August 2024 edition of Mormonism Researched. To request a free subscription, please visit here.

Published 9/26/2024

Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are told by church leaders that Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of their religion, had been given the ability by God to make reliable translations from languages he did not know, including “reformed” Egyptian, Hebrew and Greek.

According to these leaders, Smith supposedly translated (in order):

• An unidentified language written on parchment in April 1829 that was eventually placed in D&C 7.
• The Book of Mormon from 1827-1829 that came from a record of ancient Israelites written in “Reformed Egyptian” on gold plates.
• The Book of Moses in the Pearl of Great Price from June 1830 to February 1831 despite not having any manuscript from which to work.
• The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible from June 1830 to July 1833 without understanding Greek or Hebrew, the original languages of the Bible.
• The Book of Abraham in the Pearl of Great Price from 1835 to 1842 that were written in Egyptian hieroglyphics on papyrus “by the gift and power of God.”

For many Latter-day Saints, trust in their leaders along with their complete faith in Joseph Smith having the ability to translate is required. If the founder of this religion was unsuccessful in his translations, this is problematic. Perhaps nothing sheds more light on the inability of Mormonism’s founder to translate ancient languages than the story of the Kinderhook Plates during the last 14 months of his life.

The Story of the Kinderhook Plates

In April 1843, a group of men led by Robert Wiley created a set of six bell-shaped brass plates about 3 x 2 ¼ inches with foreign-looking letters engraved on them. The plates were hidden by local men in an Indian burial mound near the small village of Kinderhook in Pike County, south of Nauvoo and Carthage in Illinois.

In the May 1^st, 1843 edition of the LDS periodical Times and Seasons, W.P. Harris wrote a letter to the editor explaining how the plates were uncovered and how “we all feel anxious to know the true meaning of the plate.” Harris added, “If Smith can decipher the hieroglyphics on the plates, he will do more towards throwing light on the early history of this continent, than any man now living” (4:186).

It was a public challenge that apparently enticed the Mormon founder; Smith said that if the plates were left with him, he could “by the help of revelation . . . be able to translate them.” On Saturday, April 29^th, the plates were brought to Smith’s home in nearby Nauvoo where they were copied and studied for five days. 

Smith’s secretary, William Clayton, wrote a personal journal entry on May 1, 1843: “Prest J 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. . .” (186). This information was used in the May 1^st, 1843 entry in the History of Church where Smith, likening these brass plates to the Book of Mormon’s gold plates, reportedly said, “I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found” (5:372, emphasis mine).

A broadside included in the Nauvoo Neighbor newspaper titled “Discovery of the Brass Plates” was released on June 24^th, 1843, stating that “the contents of the plates . . . will be published in the ‘Times & Seasons,’ as soon as the translation is completed.”

The January 15^th, 1844 Times and Seasons claimed that the Kinderhook plates would help validate the Book of Mormon. As late as May 22, 1844, the local newspaper Warsaw Signal reported that Smith was “busy in translating them. The new work which Jo. is about to issue as a translation of these plates will be nothing more nor less than a sequel to the Book of Mormon.”  Just a month after the Signal article was published, Smith was killed in a gun battle at the Carthage Jail.

The truth about the Kinderhook plates

The plates were created as a joke. On April 25, 1856, W. P. Harris—one of those who “found” the plates buried eight feet underground under a flat rock— admitted how Bridge Whitton and Robert Wiley “engraved them themselves” (James D. Bales, The Book of Mormon? 95-96). Another witness, Wilburn Fugate, had a role in the “humbug” and, on June 30, 1879, said that the men wanted to fulfill “Parley P. Pratt’s prophecy that ‘Truth is yet to spring out of the earth’ through a joke” (Improvement Era, September 1962, 656).

Although the plates were thought to be lost, the fifth plate was rediscovered in 1920 and underwent several tests, though no conclusion could be made. Welby W. Ricks, who was president of the BYU Archaeological Society, explained in the September 1962 Improvement Era how he believed the plates were “genuine” and enthusiastically declared that “what scholars may learn from this ancient record in future years or what may be translated by divine power is an exciting thought to contemplate” (660).

Ricks concluded his article: “Joseph Smith, Jun., stands as a true prophet and translator of ancient records by divine means and all the world is invited to investigate the truth which has sprung out of the earth not only of the Kinderhook plates, but the Book of Mormon as well.”

Despite this optimism, an LDS physicist named George M. Lawrence made a physical study on the plate in 1965 and declared that the plate “should be regarded with suspicion.”  He claimed, “The dimensions, tolerances, composition and workmanship are consistent with the facilities of an 1843 blacksmith shop and with the fraud stories of the original participants” (“Report of a Physical Study of the Kinderhook Plate Number 5,” Princeton, May 1966).

Because Lawrence was not allowed to make destructive tests, some LDS scholars did not accept his skepticism. Then, in the August 1981 Ensign magazine, LDS historian Stanley B. Kimball wrote an article titled “Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax.” He reported how destructive tests showed that the “plate owned by the Chicago Historical Society is not of ancient origin” but instead originated in the 19^th century; thus, he concluded, “Joseph Smith needs no defense—he simply did not fall for the scheme” (74).

Some Mormon apologists argue that no translation was ever published. Yet this should be no surprise since Smith continued to work with the Book of Abraham papyri seven years after he purchased it. It must be remembered that the Kinderhook plates did not come to surface until a year before Smith’s death. The reports through May 1844 that Smith continued to work on a translation just before he was killed is telling. To insinuate, as Stanley Kimball did, that Joseph Smith was never involved with the plates is simply not true.

Smith made it appear he believed the plates were real. As LDS Church historians Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee admit, “If Smith ever came to suspect the authenticity of the Kinderhook plates, he apparently never voiced any concern to his inner circle of friends. Church leaders, historians, and publicists continued to consider the plates genuine through the remainder of Smith’s lifetime and far beyond” (Producing Ancient Scripture, 460). They added that “there is strong evidence that Joseph Smith translated at least a small part of the Kinderhook plates” (471).

As Jerald and Sandra Tanner wrote, “Joseph Smith’s work on these fraudulent plates casts serious doubt upon his credibility as a translator,” saying that “a man who could invent such information from bogus plates is just the type of man who would pretend to translate the Book of Abraham from Egyptian papyri which he really knew nothing about or the Book of Mormon from golden plates which he never made available” (Joseph Smith and the Kinderhook Plates tract). H. Michael Marquardt pointed out how “the Kinderhook episode should be considered in evaluations of Smith’s ability to correctly decipher ancient-appearing characters” (The Rise of Mormonism: 1816-1844, 336).

Despite the lack of evidence for Smith to understand ancient languages, millions of his followers still believe he could do so. The evidence of the Kinderhook plates details how this is not the case.