Part 36: CES Letter Kinderhook Plates/Translation Claims Questions
by Sarah Allen
The Kinderhook Plates and Joseph’s attempt at translating them is something that the critics love to bring up, but when they do, they’re banking on you not knowing what really happened. Once you do understand the actual circumstances, you’re more likely to shrug and move on than you are to lose your testimony. Not only was this event inconsequential to the history of the Church, but it doesn’t even crack the top ten of supposedly controversial things Joseph said or did.
Right off the bat, Jeremy frames this dishonestly, and he either hasn’t read yet another of his own sources or he’s deliberately hiding what it says. He might link to his sources, but I’m pretty sure he’s hoping you’ll be too lazy to read them for yourselves. I’m going to go through the quotes he uses to open this section, and then I’ll talk about what really happened with the Kinderhook Plates.
He begins this section with this quote:
“I insert fac-similes of the six brass plates found near Kinderhook … I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, King of Egypt, and that he received his Kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth.” — JOSEPH SMITH, JR., HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, VOL. 5, CHAPTER 19, P.372
The History of the Church was originally compiled by Joseph’s scribes, secretaries, and friends as The History of Joseph Smith after his death, and then later edited and expanded by B.H. Roberts into a 7-volume series. This quote is taken from volume 5 of Roberts’s series, as Jeremy mentions.
However, what Jeremy gets wrong is that this quote was not given by Joseph Smith. Back in the 19th Century when these were compiled, it was relatively common while writing biographies for things originally in the third person to be changed to the first person as if the subject actually said them when they did not. This quote was originally written by William Clayton, one of Joseph’s scribes, and was taken from his personal journal entry for May 1, 1843. Where it says, “I have translated a portion of them,” the actual quote was, “Prest J. has translated a portion.”
Rebekah Clark is co-author of the book Thinking Women: A Timeline of Suffrage in Utah and works as a historian for Better Days, a nonprofit public history organization dedicated to expanding education about Utah women’s history. She holds a law degree from the J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, studied as a visiting student at Harvard Law School, and practiced law in Boston for four years. She graduated with a degree in American History and Literature from Harvard University, where her honors thesis focused on Utah women’s activism in the national suffrage movement. She has worked at the LDS Church History Department and taught as an online adjunct faculty member at BYU-Idaho. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Utah State Historical Quarterly, the Journal of Mormon History, BYU Studies, Pioneer Magazine, and BYU Law Review and in podcasts by the National Conference of State Legislatures, the Church News, What’s Her Name, Zion Art Society, and the Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. In addition to her work with Better Days, she currently serves on the board of the Mormon Women’s History Initiative Team. Rebekah lives in Highland with her husband Andrew and their five children.
Stephen O. Smoot is a doctoral student in the department of Semitic and Egyptian Languages and Literature at the Catholic University of America. He previously earned a master’s degree from the University of Toronto in Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations, with a concentration in Egyptology, and Bachelor’s degrees from Brigham Young University in Ancient Near Eastern Studies, with a concentration in Hebrew Bible, and German Studies. His areas of academic study and research include the Hebrew Bible, ancient Egypt, and Latter-day Saint scripture and history. From 2015 to 2020 Stephen was a research associate with Book of Mormon Central and is currently a research associate with the B. H. Roberts Foundation. Stephen served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in northern New England (the New Hampshire Manchester Mission), which included six months at the Joseph Smith Birthplace Memorial in Sharon, Vermont.
