In any event, while still a teenager, he took up the hobby (a common one in the “burnt-over district”) of digging for buried treasure, and soon he was selling his talents as a diviner of riches hidden in the earth to credulous neighbors. Brodie sees this avocation as initially the innocent outlet of a restless spirit: “Nimble-witted, ambitious, and gifted with a boundless imagination, he dreamed of escape…. He detested the plow as only a farmer’s son can.”
By his early twenties, Smith was over six feet tall, good-looking, and vigorously athletic (wrestling being one of his favorite pastimes, even after he had become the Mormon Prophet). In Brodie’s sketch,
He was big, powerful, and by ordinary standards very handsome, except for his nose, which was aquiline and prominent. His large blue eyes were fringed by fantastically long lashes which made his gaze seem veiled and slightly mysterious.
In the best-known portrait of the man, he is dressed to the nines in a collarless black frock coat worn over a white silk shirt and white tie. His wavy, combed-back brown hair has tints of auburn in it. The eyes stare unblinking and hypnotic at the viewer, but the mouth, pursed in a tight half-smile, exudes smugness. The overall effect of the likeness hovers on that ambiguous border between the strikingly handsome and the foppishly vain.
At the age of nineteen, on a wild-goose chase in search of a lost Spanish silver mine in the Allegheny foothills of western Pennsylvania, Joseph met and fell in love with Emma Hale, two years his elder. Brodie describes her as “a dark, serious-faced girl with great luminous hazel eyes.” Against the unbending opposition of Emma’s father, Joseph wooed her, ran away with her, and secretly married her in January 1827. In important ways, Emma would prove to be the bane of Smith’s existence.
At some point, while still a teenager, as he dug a well for a neighbor, Smith discovered what he called a “seer stone” twenty-four feet underground. With this magical aid, he launched a serious if intermittent career as diviner of subterranean riches.
At this remove, it is perhaps impossible to judge whether Smith’s treasure-hunting was a deliberate con game or sprang from sincere belief. The fact that he did little digging himself but charged others for his secret knowledge, and that he always had a ready excuse why days of shoveling turned up only rocks and dirt, suggests the former explanation. Yet legions of frontier settlers in places like western New York were utterly convinced that buried treasure abounded in their neighborhoods, a conviction reinforced by the prehistoric Indian mounds scattered across the landscape, in which diggers regularly hit paydirt of an artifactual sort.
Joseph Smith, however, would be forgotten by history, but for a pair of miraculous visitations that seized him, the first at age fourteen, the second at seventeen. In 1820, a latent religious instinct in Smith’s soul was sparked by several recent revival meetings near Palmyra. One day the youth went into the woods alone to pray to God for guidance. Almost at once, as he later wrote, he was struck dumb by some “astonishing influence,” and he found himself surrounded by “thick darkness.” As he prayed now for deliverance from this “evil” miasma, suddenly all was light, and two “personages” stood before him. One pointed to the other, saying, “This is my beloved Son, hear him.”
Smith’s initial purpose in beseeching God in the forest was to get an answer to a question that was plaguing him: which of the many sects and denominations whose doctrines had been blazoned forth at the revival meetings was the true church? Now one of the personages told him that all those sects were wrong, that “all their creeds were an abomination in His sight,” and that he must join none of them. “Many other things he did say unto me,” Smith recorded years later, “which I cannot write at this time. When I came to myself again, I found myself lying on my back, looking up into heaven.”
The second vision, which came to Smith on September 21, 1823, was even more vivid and revelatory. In his room at home, that night he knelt by his bed to pray to God “for forgiveness of all my sins and follies.” Again, a light “brighter than noonday” suffused the room and a “personage” appeared, floating in midair. As Smith later recounted,
He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness. It was a whiteness beyond anything earthly I had ever seen; nor do I believe that any earthly thing could be made to appear so exceedingly white and brilliant. His hands were naked and his arms also…. His head and neck were also bare. I could discover that he had no other clothing on but this robe, as it was open, so that I could see into his bosom. Not only was his robe exceedingly white, but his whole person was glorious beyond description, and his countenance truly like lightning….
When first I looked upon him, I was afraid; but the fear soon left me. He called me by name, and said unto me that he was a messenger sent from the presence of God to me and that his name was Moroni; that God had a work for me to do…. He said there was a book deposited, written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the sources from whence they sprang. He also said that the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants; also that there were two stones in silver bows and these stones, fastened to a breastplate, constituted what is called the Urim and Thummim deposited with the plates; and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted “Seers” in ancient or former times; and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.
Moroni (pronounced “Mo-ROAN-eye”; Mormon proper names ending in “i” almost always take the long form of the vowel) was not only an angel, but a prophet who had lived in America many centuries before the first Europeans arrived. It was Moroni, in fact, who had buried the golden plates around A.D. 421.
The very next day, Smith went out to work in the fields, but he was so weak, his father sent him home. On the way, he fell into a swoon, only to be visited again by Moroni, who now told him exactly where the plates were buried. “Convenient to the village of Manchester, Ontario county, New York,” Smith later wrote, “stands a hill of considerable size, and the most elevated of any in the neighborhood. On the west side of this hill, not far from the top, under a stone of considerable size, lay the plates, deposited in a stone box.” Smith dug up the box and, with the aid of a lever, pried it open. “I looked in, and there indeed did I behold the plates, the Urim and Thummim, and the breastplate.” But just as he started to seize the plates, Moroni again appeared, warning Smith that he was not spiritually prepared to receive this testament of the true church.
As directed by Moroni, Smith returned to the hill once a year for four years on the anniversary of his discovery. Finally, on September 21, 1827, the angelic messenger allowed the youth (now twenty-one years old) to carry the plates away with him.
The hill, named Cumorah, stands a mere several hundred feet above the surrounding fields, just off State Highway 21, which connects Palmyra and Manchester. However unprepossessing it may be as a geologic eminence, Cumorah is today a prominent stop for Mormon history tours. Every July since 1937, a Hill Cumorah Pageant, lasting seven days, has attracted as many as ten thousand visitors (both Saints and non-Mormons) from all over the country and the world.
The golden plates were densely inscribed with a hieroglyphic script, a sample of which Smith later transcribed. But a condition of his custodianship of the sacred objects, Smith insisted, was that no one else be allowed to look at them. Somehow the young treasure-hunter recognized the language of the glyphs as what he called “reformed Egyptian.” With the aid of his seer stones, the Urim and Thummim, he set out to translate the plates. His wife, Emma, was his first scribe, as he dictated out loud. Though the plates often lay on the table, wrapped in a linen tablecloth, she never saw them; she did, however, dare to handle them when she dusted the table, and later reported that the plates “seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb.”
Eventually Smith collaborated with a more credulous scribe, a farmer friend named Mart
in Harris, who in turn was succeeded by a schoolmaster named Oliver Cowdery. The procedure must have seemed a bit bizarre, even to true believers. With Harris, Smith sat in a room partitioned by a blanket thrown across a rope. Smith sat on one side, staring painfully at the plates with his Urim and Thummim, while Harris sat on the other side, writing down the sentences as Smith translated them. Smith repeatedly warned his scribe that “God’s wrath would strike him down” should he even sneak a look at the plates.
By 1829, working with Cowdery, Smith had replaced the Urim and Thummim with the seer stone that he had found in the well, which he placed in an upturned hat. He then plunged his face into the hat, cutting off all surrounding light, as with the stone he deciphered the plates one character at a time. Starting on April 7, Smith dictated all 275,000 words of what would become the Book of Mormon in seventy-five days, at an extraordinary pace, averaging around 3,700 words a day.
Five thousand copies of the Book of Mormon were published by a local printer in 1830. On April 6 of that year, Smith formally founded his new church.
By then, in accordance with his promise to the angelic messenger, Smith had returned the golden plates to Moroni. No one would ever see them again.
TO THE AGNOSTIC or the skeptic, virtually all religions may seem to be founded on events and concepts that are absurd and implausible. (The Trinity? The Virgin Birth? The Second Coming?) Yet from its inception, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has been singled out for ridicule on account of the wildly far-fetched story of Joseph Smith and the golden plates. To Bernard DeVoto, for example, the Book of Mormon seemed “a yeasty fermentation, formless, aimless, and inconceivably absurd.”
At first blush, there seem to be three separate and mutually exclusive explanations for what was going on in and around Palmyra, New York, in the 1820s. One is what twelve million Mormons steadfastly believe: that the angel and prophet Moroni really did appear to Joseph Smith; that the golden plates were not only real, but had inscribed on them the authentic gospel; that Smith translated them with the aid of various seer stones; and thus that the Book of Mormon corrected more than a millennium and a half of Christian error and gave the world the only true message of God’s dispensation. All other religions are wrong.
For nonbelievers, however, two other explanations immediately present themselves. The first is that a teenage treasure-hunter and con artist set out to perpetrate a deliberate fraud, one that would become the most successful in American history. Fawn Brodie would seem to be of this camp. “Perhaps in the beginning,” she writes in No Man Knows My History, “Joseph never intended his stories of the golden plates to be taken so seriously, but once the masquerade had begun, there was no point at which he could call a halt. Since his own family believed him (with the possible exception of his cynical younger brother William), why not the world?”
Brodie had grown up Mormon in Utah, but became more and more skeptical as she went through high school and college. At the University of Chicago, where she did graduate work, she lost her faith entirely. “It was like taking a hot coat off in the summertime,” she told an interviewer in 1975. In 1946, the year after she published her biography of Joseph Smith, the church excommunicated her.
The alternative agnostic explanation is that, while the whole business about the golden plates was nonsense, Smith sincerely believed it—that he was in the grips of the sort of profound self-delusion that afflicts many religious visionaries.
At second blush, however, the three explanations turn out not to be mutually exclusive. Writes Morris Werner in his biography of Brigham Young:
It is impossible to determine exactly whether the golden plates of the Book of Mormon were an imaginative delusion of Joseph Smith’s, or whether they were a piece of conscious fakery instituted at first for fun and later developed for their financial possibilities. His later acts seem to favor the opinion that he had succeeded in deluding himself, however much he may have been interested at first in deceiving other people.
Some extraordinarily intelligent men and women have devoted the best parts of their lives to defending the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and the truth of the LDS church. One of them was Brigham Henry Roberts (1857–1933), whose six-volume A Comprehensive History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints remains unparalleled. One scholar calls Roberts “intellectually the most eminent and influential of all the official leaders of the Church.” Another hails him as “the greatest Mormon thinker of his generation, or perhaps any generation.”
Around the turn of the twentieth century, Roberts vigorously and eloquently defended the Book of Mormon against its learned critics. The terms upon which the debates hinged seem quaint and hyper-scholastic today: whether, for instance, 553 years intervened between Zedekiah’s reign as the last king of Judah and Christ’s birth (the biblical version) or six hundred years, as the Book of Mormon specified. Yet in one controversy after another, Roberts reportedly put the doubters to rout.
Then, late in his own life, the great Mormon thinker was apparently assailed by his own doubts. He had always striven to reconcile science and religion; he believed passionately that one could be a devout Mormon and a rational pragmatist at the same time. In the 1920s, perplexed by how Darwin’s theory of evolution and the discoveries of New World archaeologists seemed to contradict Mormon doctrine, he drafted a pair of manuscripts that he titled “A Book of Mormon Study” and “Book of Mormon Difficulties.” Joseph Smith’s gospel claimed that long before the first Europeans arrived, the natives of North America had possessed such domestic animals as horses, cows, sheep, and pigs, as well as weapons and tools of iron and steel, crops including wheat and barley, and wheeled vehicles. The archaeologists insisted that none of the above was true.
Roberts’s superiors in the church deemed these late works too heretical to bring to light without major revisions. Roberts declined. The problematic manuscripts were not published until 1985—fifty-two years after Roberts’s death.
There is a school of Mormon thought that in these late treatises, Roberts was not truly plagued by doubt, but was rather playing the devil’s advocate, positing all possible rational objections to the Book of Mormon in hopes of finding the loopholes that would leave the LDS doctrine unscathed. Yet the problems Roberts raised remain unanswered: as far as we know, before Columbus, no Native American had ever seen a horse, a steel weapon, or a vehicle with wheels. The integrity of the greatest Mormon theorist’s willingness, late in life, to open his mind to the fundamental historical problems raised by the Book of Mormon should win him admiration, not excuses.
Whether or not Joseph Smith concocted his 531-page gospel out of his own runaway imagination, or was simply the amanuensis for a divine revelation, the Book of Mormon is an astonishing performance. To be sure, it is not an easy book to read, and many a good Mormon has nodded off long before reaching the closing “Book of Moroni.” Mark Twain famously called Smith’s book “chloroform in print,” and, singling out the work’s recurrent verbal tic, added, “‘And it came to pass’ was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet.”
The Book of Mormon is riddled with grammatical errors and apparent anachronisms of diction and style. Whole chapters of Isaiah are lifted verbatim from the Old Testament. One of the antagonists Roberts debated claimed that Joseph had quoted not only from the King James version of the Bible (not published until 1611, or almost twelve centuries after Moroni supposedly buried the golden plates), but from Hamlet’s famous soliloquy.
From almost the time it was first published until the present day, the Book of Mormon has been accused of being a wholesale plagiarism, either from the manuscript of a romance novel by one Solomon Spaulding, or from a popular 1823 treatise written by a Vermont pastor named Ethan Smith called View of the Hebrews, which advanced the then voguish theory that American Indians were the remnants of the lost tribes of Israel. Neither plagiarism claim has been proved or disproved (Spaulding’s manuscript is apparently irret
rievably lost), but B. H. Roberts himself was sufficiently troubled by the similarities with View of the Hebrews that he compiled a twin-columned document that he called “A Parallel,” laying without comment the overly close passages of the two Smiths side by side. This study, too, was not published until 1985, but it gives serious pause to anyone who peruses it today.
Quite aside from allegations of plagiarism, Smith has been long accused of recklessly borrowing not only doctrine, but later, ecclesiastical rituals from the secret practices of the Freemasons. Yet astonishing the Book of Mormon remains, especially in view of the fact that its “author,” having kicked around with his vagabond farming family through the backwaters of Vermont and New York, had absorbed precious little schooling by the age of twenty-four, when the new gospel was first published.
In the face of such early criticism, Smith obtained the written affidavits of eleven of his friends and Palmyra neighbors (including Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery), who swore that they had not only seen the golden plates (despite Smith’s initial warning against such a violation), but also that “we did handle [them] with our hands,” that “we have seen and hefted” them. For the skeptic, it is curious that although several of these witnesses later left the church, none ever recanted his testimony. This fact bothers Brodie enough to make her speculate, “Perhaps Joseph built some kind of makeshift deception. If so, it disappeared with his announcement that the same angel that had revealed to him the sacred record had now carried it back into heaven.” Brodie and others have wondered whether Smith in effect hypnotized his witnesses.
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