I have spent quite a bit of time (for a non-historian anyhow) studying how the Book of Mormon was translated. In looking at original sources, I came up with my own opinion on how the process worked. I’m probably wrong, and it’s just speculation, of course, since Joseph Smith (nor Oliver Cowdry for that matter) ever told us how it worked. The sources that do exist, such as Martin Harris, had a lot less familiarity with the process and, presumably, were coming up with their own theories based on their limited experience.

Nevertheless, I still carefully read through what information was available and formed and opinion.

In my opinion, the interpreters (either the Nephite Interpreters or the Seer Stone) were, to use a modern analogy, like a computer interface. They could store information — or possibly accesses it at a distance — and also suggested word for word translation of characters similar to the way Martin Harris described. (Marin claims the hierglyphics would appear and then a translation would appear).

To follow my computer analogy, this is similar to how google translation works. It takes the words and then figures out the equivalent word or words in another language. It’s a non-intelligent process since it’s basically just a word for word look up against a database.

However, I think Martin Harris, typical of a non-scholar, did not understand that a word for word translation is not a completed translation. If you ever google translate, it’s horrible because it’s so literal and the grammar is all wrong. Someone then must take those words and figure out a real English sentence to put the underlying idea into and there is a real art to doing this. This part of the process requires actual intelligence and can’t be done mechanically.

I personally believe that is how the translation process worked and personally I think this is why Joseph Smith did indeed “translate” the Book of Mormon in the literal sense of the word. This opinion is fully informed by the sources, though it’s only one possible way to look at that data.

Jon Blake has, as we see above, accused me and all Mormons of lying because, as it were, we hold an opinion different than his.

Jon, you are entitled to your opinion as am I to mine. But I really have concerns over someone accusing anyone that disagrees with their interpretation as lying. In fact, I think this is a intolerant and prejudice act if done willfully.

I hope that my explanation will help explain why a sensible person might quite literally believe Joseph Smith translated the plates while being fully informed by the historical sources and that you will be able to put this issue behind you now and stop accusing others of lying just because they disagree with you.

Now I am willing to assume you did it innocently, but please, in the future, do not pretend to read other people’s minds. Please let people hold their own opinions and explain themselves rather than put words into their mouth and minds for them.

I also highly recommend DPCs article on this subject of accusing others of lying just because they disagree with you: http://theuttermeaninglessnessofeverything.blogspot.com/2007/11/on-truth.html This is really just a form of conspiracy theory, as DPC demonstrates.

Sarah Josepha Hale lived just down the road a bit from said Smith’s hometown. Hale is far better known for her nursery rhyme Mary Had A Little Lamb and also for her tireless effort in petitioning Congress and the Presidents to have Thanksgiving declared a national holiday. Her book is THE GENIUS OF OBLIVION; And Other Original Poems. By a Lady of New Hampshire.[Sarah Joseph Hale] Concord [New Hampshire]: Jacob B. Moore, 1823. Though not as lengthy and with no Masonic parallels or illusions to terrorists, robbers or Antinomians and perhaps will not garner the notoriety that the Book of Mormon will, it is nonetheless striking in its content.

Seems this work of fiction preceded Smith’s own book by seven years. In the same year that Smith was holding his first interview with Moroni, Hale was busy writing her first book. Hale did not have the good fortune to have her book reviewed by the insightful New York Ages but it did help to fill the wide-spread interest in Native American origins along with VIEW OF THE HEBREWS, (also published the same year) MANUSCRIPT FOUND (The Spaulding Manuscript), AMERICAN ANTIQUITIES, and many others.

Hale’s book also has an apparition: The “Genius of Oblivion,” who speaks to the book’s hero Ormond, a descendant of those now-forgotten people. Ormond, while praying one day in the forest, feels powerless to learn the history of his people, how they came to America and then perished,

“. . . And where
The archives of their history,
Their tomes [i.e., volumes] of kings, forgotten lie?” [p. 37]

The “Genius of Oblivion” appears and tells Ormond that the first American inhabitants came from Tyre (some hundred miles from Jerusalem) during the siege of Nebuchadnezzar (585-573 B.C.). As Nebuchadnezzar and his ilk are bashing down the gate to the city, a small band of people flee by ship across the Atlantic to the New World (”. . . Nor land more blest, than in the west . . . ,” p. 62). The pioneer Arvon and his bride Cora, with rowers and handmaidens, sail away from their Mediterranean home, knowing that the “western Eden will repay/ All present sighs and sorrow . . . ,” p. 61.

Perhaps had The Genius of Oblivion been reviewed by the prestigious “New York Ages” we would all be reading and critiquing it, rather than the Book of Mormon.

We do hope that the Book of Mormon’s “exciting second edition (with a few doctrinal and grammatical revisions) which is anticipated shortly” will help shed more light on what will certainly become a best seller. Who knows, maybe even The Genius of Oblivion with be reprinted.

And further this deponent sayeth not.

JFQ, I’m sure you know this already… but for the record, I don’t necessarily agree with my New York Ages reviewer.

While drafting some remarks in 1987, I wrote the following lines which were not published, but which may apply now, albeit not in such narrow context as I framed it then:

“Bushman suggests that the Book of Mormon secret robber societies could be viewed by a different (say twentieth-century) audience as terrorist dissenters ‘undermining from within, and attacking openly when they had strength.’ Perhaps this is quite true, but in fact irrelevant. In the twenty-first century, talks may be given in the Mormon Tabernacle admonishing the Saints to beware of insidious Yuppie-Capitalist power brokers, of which Nephi of old will have warned us when he prophesied of evil secret combinations marshalling their forces in the latter days.

“What matters here, in my opinion, is what the Book of Mormon itself contributes to our perception of nineteenth-century anti-Masonic parallels in its text, and how contemporaries of Joseph Smith understood it. . . .” (quotation above from Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism [Urbana and Chicago: Univ. of Illinois Press, (1984)], 131.)

Of course, by “irrelevant,” above, I only intended “irrelevant to establishing Book of Mormon historicity.” If all of the current themes and elements of today’s modern world which we discover in an old book’s text were also present in the writer’s own world - at least as powerfully then as now, and just as available - then while implications of the book’s universal application may stand unscathed, any insinuations of transcendent prophecy (regarding those specific themes and elements) lose logical ground.

By not insisting that your reviewer at “New York Ages” implied anything of the sort, of course, you invite us to appreciate modern benefits of a significant text which - I would contend - need not have imagined the news-worthy events of today in order to advise and warn us of them nonetheless. For example, your reviewer discovers a “western-like Nephite tribe” which “builds large cities, is productive in capitalistic trade, and gains superior technology while their more technologically primitive Islamic Fundamentalist brethren have to rely on their larger numbers to compete.” A little more archaically, on the other hand, I see . . .

“. . . the imagined origin of the race of men supposed to have inhabited the western parts of America long before the Indian tribes roamed in that once cheerless wilderness, and to whose labors have been attributed the numerous mounds and forts of earth discovered in several of the western states, particularly in Ohio, and indicating in their builders such a knowledge of the arts of civilization as none of the Indian tribes have ever been known to possess.” (Collections, Historical and Miscellaneous: and Monthly Literary Journal 2 [September 1823 issue, edited by
J. Farmer and J. B. Moore, Concord, New Hampshire], p. 286)

Your modern reviewer discovers “a Lamanite preacher . . . standing on a Texan-style fort wall (Smith must have recently watched the Alamo) and preaching to Nephites about how they need to accept Jesus and repent.” I see Samson Occom (1723-92) creating a sensation preaching both to Anglo aristocracy and to his fellow Native Americans, finally residing among the humble Oneida of New York State who fully espoused Christianity and united themselves with the American colonists in opposition to the hoards of British-allied Indians who sallied forth from the wilderness throughout the American Revolution to terrorize, to raid and to torture.

“Instead of Fundamentalist Christianity,” your reviewer discovers “a more traditional - and dare we say a more ‘liberal’ - Christian point of view” in this recently-published Book of Mormon. “Biblical inerrancy is attacked and the dangers of using only the Bible as one’s only creed are put down. Continuing in that theme, the evils of deterministic salvation are decried. It would seem Joseph Smith wants to keep reminding us that while Christianity is the one true way, extreme conservative Christianity isn’t.” I don’t work so hard as your reviewer, but I see hardships endured by poor 1820s Reformed Dutch worshippers just south of Fayette, Seneca County, New York who have recently been kicked out of their house of worship by “Antinomians” who, like Book of Mormon Zoramites in the land of Antionum, insist upon more conservative Calvinism than their more liberal brethren. (Wilhelmus Eltinge, A Discourse, Designed as an Exposition and Refutation of the Reasons Assigned in a Pamphlet, By a Number of Ministers, Elders, and Deacons. For Declaring Themselves the True Reformed Dutch Church, In the United States of America. By Wilhelmus Eltinge, A. M. [Ovid, N. Y.: Printed by M. Hayes, n.d. (but 182-?)], 4; Alma 31:3)

And yet, and yet, and yet . . . if the book “is clearly a work of fiction oh-so-typical of [its] century, this Book of Mormon only thinly veils its modern political agenda,” . . . if we will only see it. Like any world literature, the text at hand can contain whatever readers will find in it. If that were not the case, we would not hear of an exciting second edition (with a few doctrinal and grammatical revisions) which is anticipated shortly.