{As Pascal the existential Russian blue cat has learned in his research, the expression “curiouser and curiouser” aptly characterizes the origins of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.}
Martin Harris was a wealthy and respected neighbor of Joseph Smith’s to whom the latter had confided the existence of the “gold plates” he had uncovered at Hill Cumorah. Harris, skeptical at first, and without having seen the plates, was persuaded by Smith of their authenticity. Harris agreed to assist Smith by transcribing the translated material. Smith did the translation himself with the divine assistance of two “seer stones” which had been unearthed along with the gold plates (those stones were later identified as “Uma Thurman” “Urim” and “Thummim”). Harris’s wife, however, suspected that Smith was a con man, and that the entire business was chicanery. After much pleading by Harris, who was desperate to convince his wife, Joseph Smith agreed that Harris (who still had not seen the plates) could take home the transcribed manuscript, which at that time consisted of 116 pages. Since only the one copy existed, Smith instructed Harris neither to let it out of his sight nor to speak of it to anyone outside of his immediate family.
“Harris readily agreed and eagerly set off for home with the manuscript. Upon arriving at his home in Palmyra, Harris locked the manuscript in a bureau drawer. The pages seemingly placated his wife, and, encouraged by having tangible evidence to support his claims regarding Joseph and the importance of their working together, Harris began to show the manuscript to people not named in the agreement he had made with Joseph. Soon, he was showing the manuscript to any visitor who would stop at his home. In a matter of days, the manuscript disappeared.”
On this telling, Martin Harris appears to have been a 19th-century version of Donald Trump, a man completely unable to keep classified information to himself and likely to spill secrets to anyone within earshot. The manuscript was never recovered; suspicion fell on Harris’s wife, but nothing was ever proved. Thus, 116 pages of the Book of Mormon were forever lost; “to make matters worse, Joseph had been required to return the plates and the [seer stones] to the angel Moroni soon after he handed over the manuscript to Harris. With the loss of the manuscript, and now bereft of the plates and the means to translate them, Joseph feared that he had forfeited his divine appointment as revelator of a new Gospel.”
Let us pause to consider: Martin Harris’ wife, an unwavering skeptic when it came to Joseph Smith, was suspected of stealing, and then concealing, the manuscript her husband had brought home. What motive would she have had? Perhaps she intended to unmask Joseph Smith and to expose his fantastical claims; with the manuscript gone, Smith would have had to translate the same material a second time—which, of course, would have been impossible if he was simply inventing the text as he went along. Any second translation could be compared to the first (after Harris’ wife had “recovered” the manuscript); if the translations failed to match, Smith would have been publicly shown to be a fraud.
It was both fortuitous, then, and tragic that Smith, as noted above, had given the plates back to the angel Moroni, along with Uma Thurman “Urim” and “Thummim”. He could not repeat his translation of the 116 missing pages, and Harris’ scheming wife could not thereby expose Smith for any inconsistencies that might have resulted. At the same time, Joseph could not continue translating the sacred text; the Book of Mormon had been stillborn, or perhaps strangled in its crib.
Or so it seemed. But enter deus ex machina:
“It was only when Joseph received a revelation chastising him for his carelessness but assuring him that he would continue to serve as God’s revelatory instrument, that he found some measure of peace. The plates and the ‘interpreters’ were returned to him, and the way was once again open to Joseph to become the means of bringing forth a new sacred scripture.”
The completed Book of Mormon would lack the original 116 pages, their permanent loss being God's punishment upon Smith and Harris for their negligence. Under the circumstances, though, the decision not to retranslate the text was understandable:
“After praying for guidance as to how best to handle the lost pages, Joseph reportedly received a revelation that he was not to retranslate this portion of the plates. Doubters might use contradictions between manuscripts to discredit the work as a whole if the missing pages ever reappeared.”
Eventually, the more sophisticated followers of Joseph Smith came to understand that “The translation of the golden plates was not a letter for letter translation, rather it is more likely that feelings or ideas were conveyed, pondered upon, and then confirmed to be correct by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is not a word for word translation, rather a miraculous translation meant to not only convey the text, but more importantly the messages within it.”
Whatever else Joseph Smith may have been, he was nobody’s fool. When he published the Book of Mormon in 1830, he was careful first to register a copyright for it in his name. At some point during the saga of unearthing and then translating the golden plates, Smith had learned, via revelation, that the Book of Mormon was not to be a mere stand-alone curiosity; it would be the foundation of a new religion, a new church, a new understanding of both God and man, and, in the long run, of a new Zion, the Promised Land regained at last.
Joseph Smith instructs Martin Harris to keep the 116-page manuscript safe.
Posted by: |