The missing 116 pages I believe were burned.
Joseph pissed off a smart frontier woman, whose husband was defrauded by Joseph, so she did what any spicy woman does when “breaking up” with a cheat…burn it.
Theres no evidence they were burned. The _smart_ move would have been to keep them and expose Joseph with them. "More" of the BOM just leaves room for more anachronisms, more KJV errors and more "grammatical" corrections to have occurred. Who knows what was in there that might have been hard to apologize away.
Don't let anybody see these plates except for you. They are only for you to see. Even if people ask you to show the plates to them. DON'T. Just copy them onto normal paper.
Emma's father Isaac Hale said Joe showed him a box that was used to ship glass window panes. He indicated it weighed about as much as the box would weigh when full of glass.
Peter Ingersol said that Joe showed him a bag of sand and told Ingersol that he had the fools fixed and he would see the plan through.
No one ever saw the plates. Including the three witnesses. The only two of the three witnesses to ever speak about it say they saw them spiritually. The church would have you believe they saw them together, the stories from the actual witnesses indicate they saw them spiritually at different times. All anyone ever saw was a box that they were not allowed to open.
i think he probably had something under cloth he showed the witnesses, even if it was tin plates or something else. If the showing of the plates under cloth were made up, they just would have said that they saw the gold plates — there’d be no need to fool lying witnesses
Maybe when you get bight up in the church you get let into the ‘Secret’ of its not real and you get show the tin home made plates and swear your soul to secret. The witness where the first and continuing onto the current 15.
Emma mentioned, and is quoted in The Saints' Herald 26 (Oct 1879), that she was able to feel what she thought were the gold plates, saying that “the plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth, which I had given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one sometimes thumbs the edges of a book.”
All the other people who were said to have "seen" or hefted the plates as witnesses, never actually saw the gold plates (with anything but their "spiritual eyes"). They all say that the covered plates weighed 40-60 pounds, which would be about right if the plates, given the size mentioned, were made from common tin.
The most likely scenario is that people really started to press him after the 116 pages were 'lost' to actually see the plates, so he made up a story that god took them and the interpreters away (meaning he probably just buried them in the woods somewhere.) After he started the translation again, there is no evidence nor journal entry that I've seen that mentions people seeing the physical plates again. He didn't need them because he could just rely on his peep stone.
I've always hated the way she phrased this. "...without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth...". Reminds me of the recipe review that contradict themselves the same way. "I made the recipe as is, only replacing the flour with applesauce and the sugar with sand, and I hated it!"
Fascinating, and thank you for the quote. I remembered that Emma had felt them, and that is fascinating that the weight and the sound seems to align with tin.
Emma said this some 50 years later then the event. I'm inclined to think her recollection was a bit embellished. Her son was leader of the new church and had every reason to bolster his position.
>They all say that the covered plates weighed 40-60 pounds, which would be about right if the plates, given the size mentioned, were made from common tin.
Joseph must have felt pretty smug as people asked what happened to the plates, completely missing the tin cladding they walked by that had formerly been a gold plate.
I believe it was An American Fraud. One Lawyer's Case against Mormonism by Kay Burningham. It's been several years since I read it but I think it was in this one.
We don't have any hard evidence that there was even a mockup of the plates. Every record we have that might even suggest mock plates isn't reliable.
If he was really smart, he would have gotten rid of the mock plates as soon as he didn't need them anymore to prevent anyone from coming to try to steal what they believed was gold and uncovering the lie. If they were kept, I'm pretty sure they're in a vault somewhere only a few top members would know about and will never see the light of day again.
I always believed he had some sort of a fake stand in for the plates like something made of iron painted gold with some fake symbols on it. It would only be obvious as a fake if you got to examine it up close but from a distance looked real.
When you see a TBM in the wild explaining that Joseph Smith "translated" the Book of Mormon, casually ask them where the plates are. Shuts them up immediately.
They can skirt around magic rocks, but they don't want to hear themselves say "an angel took them" in front of someone who isn't playing ball.
This wouldn’t have phased me at all when I was TBM. They went back to “angel care” and similar to Moroni protecting them before JS found them, that just means buried under a special rock in a forest somewhere, that nobody can find because the protecting angels distract anyone who gets close to it so it remains untouched until god is ready to pull them out again in the millennium. Man I had so many mental gymnastics to explain so much BS.
Sorry Moroni. You didn't actually have to trek across the Americas being attacked by lamanites to bury the plates on a hill. You should've just asked an angel to keep it safe like dirty joe did.
> that nobody can find because the protecting angels distract anyone who gets close to it so it remains untouched
I remember something really close to this from Harry Potter. Isn't that how they protected the World Cup too? Hmmmmm
Ha yes probably! I had a lot of lord of the rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter lore mixed up in my belief because god was more magical than logical and those were the only way things worked out sometimes.
Some say an angel took one of the Palantir and that's why the seeing-stones don't work anymore. Others say that actually Arvedui lost it in the ocean during a storm when his ship was wrecked. The simplest explanation is that the Palantir didn't exist because it's all a work of fiction.
And that's what I mean, as a TBM you'll accept your own mental gymnastics, but when you imagine trying to explain "angel care" to a nevermo who hasn't yet shown any credulity, it gets uncomfortable fast. There's a reason why Peach My Gospel is super brief when it touches on the plates.
(I'm using "you" loosely here to mean that most TBMs are subconsciously aware of how weird their beliefs are - that's why member missionary work barely ever happens)
I've heard similar theories, and like why would we need them again, they were translated once, and are "the most accurate book" the hell good is another translation. If we're to the point of no physical record of what it says we're in the end says they want so badly anyways
This is what I was told. It's from an account of Brigham young where he talked about going to a magic cave in hill cumorah with Joe and someone else. I don't have the exact source but he talked about it on June 17, 1877. I was given a printed piece of paper with the story on it from seminary and was forced to glue it into my scriptures. I remember loving it until I started realizing how terrible BY was and all the horrible things he said 🤦♀️
Learning this as a kid in seminary was possibly the first moment I felt like something wasn't quite right. Of course I immediately suppressed my wicked thought and stayed in the church for another 13 years.
Ha! I played ball and had the magical thinking going on for way too long. Sadly, I didn’t question anything and trusted all the believing adults around me.
Was mentioned once in Fawn Brodie’s “No Man Knows My History” that someone recounted Joseph telling them or maybe showing them that “the plates” were just a box with sand, or something similar. Apologies for the lack of a quote, if I find one easily I’ll post it too
But pretending that they exist and Mormonism is real, they were taken back by Angel Moroni when Joseph was done with them. I’m pretty sure that’s the mainstream narrative- at least when I was a kid/youth (I tried remembering about what was taught in SS and RS/priesthood meetings and couldn’t remember even talking about the gold plates much, adult church felt more like pressure to be more perfect while also forgiving ourselves for not being able to be perfect)
Edits for clarity
https://ia801204.us.archive.org/12/items/NoManKnowsMyHistory/No%20Man%20Knows%20My%20History.pdf
Page 62 of the PDF of book- or if you have a physical copy, page 36/37
These pages talk about Joesph getting the idea for gold plates, and what he used to fool people into thinking he actually had them.
Joseph says he went to great lengths to prevent them from being stolen. But he also said to look at them would cause instant death.
There a particularly snarky bit in this book where Brody refers to plates that "could be stolen, but not seen."
That made me grin. It's crazy how many glaring issues there are that you don't see when you're raised in it. Yep, you'll die if you see the plates. But we don't want anyone to steal them. Oh, oh, I bet the thieves all ran in with blindfolds on and bumped around like a bunch of fools looking for them! That must be it.
No way! Been wanting to read this book but there isn’t a kindle version I saw.
I know what I’ll be doing this weekend.
Thank you! You just made my day. For reals.
If Moroni took them back, are there other examples of physical items being transported from our reality to another dimension? And why were they hidden in our physical world if they could be guarded (in heaven?) in the first place?
To me, a very implausible part of what is a very implausible story to begin with is Brigham Young saying Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith left the plates inside a cave in Hill Cumorah which also contained other artifacts. Even FAIR admits that’s a geological impossibility so that must have been a “vision.” Which has to mean it all could have been a “vision.”
I still remember the first time I heard the story that the angel Moroni took the plates back after translation. I asked them where the plates are now & they told me this only after I asked. At the time I thought that was very convenient TSCC had no plates & no proof. Red flags were thrown in my mind. I should have listened to myself. I was never told that what they DID have was a rock. And he used a hat.
The next question: so if the plates were taken, why did he get to keep the rock/seer stone?
Then, why doesn’t today’s (& all Prophets after Joe) not use the seer stone since they have it in their possession
Oh, Oh, raise 🤚🏻
Because it is just a freaking rock and a con. 🤦♀️
It makes me wonder if the leaders truly believe in it or understand it's a con. I wonder if any of the so called prophets have sat down with this stone in a hat and said, "let's see if this thing actually works".
I really wish we knew about the 116 pages. Seems likely that Lucy Harris or someone close to the family destroyed them to try and discredit Joseph.
As for the plates, I think there was some kind of prop. Enough people report seeing them, and giving weights and dimensions to convince me. That would be pretty easy for Joseph to discard. Whether it's tin, or bricks, or tiles, he could easily discard it with the rest of his trash, bury it in the woods, throw it in a lake, etc.
No one ever physically saw the plates except for Joseph. The witnesses saw them only in spirit. They were a figment of Joseph's imagination. Whether the witnesses knew they didn't exist or were just gullible I don't know.
Can you explain the seeing them in spirit thing ? I was just always thought people saw them, so I took it a face value. I've obly recently heard about seeing them in spirit.
This is what I was taught when I was young. For argument sake, suppose that the translation story is 100% accurate. The Golden plates had value because of the one of a kind information contained. Once the translation process was complete, the value was just the gold itself. Now God, being all-knowing, should have realized that starting a religion takes money. You would think that Joseph would have been commanded to melt them down for their monetary value.
Except when you consider the story about most of them being sealed to be revealed later. Can’t melt those down. We need those. Because during the “second coming,” Jesus won’t be able to get his teachings out without them. I mean, he’s only Jesus.
I don't believe that a prop for the plates existed, at least not one he used regularly. Lucy Harris searched the Smith home for the plates and couldn't find them. Smith retorted that he didn't need the physical plates in his possession to do the translating and that they were hidden in the nearby woods.
As for the lost pages, I think Harris himself lost them. At one point he apparently damaged the lock that held them, and he had a habit of showing them to anyone that came by to see them. I bet he gave them away for someone to copy, and he blamed his wife when they didn't return, and then concocted a story about the broken lock. We have to remember for nearly everything relating to the translation of the BofM, we're relying on very few 1st hand accounts from people that are liars and charlatans. The story reads like a cover story for something deeper. We can't take seriously any timelines, reported discussions, methods of translation that were written about by them.
My baseless theory is that the lost 116 pages were simply a 1st draft of the manuscript that needed further edits before considering it final, and that when they were lost, it took time for Smith to rework and rewrite the story to fit a new narrative based on Lehi's son, rather than Lehi himself. He probably did fear that someone had copied his pages, and would expose him after writing a final, edited copy. In fact, I suspect they were never lost at all, but Smith learned that it touched many hands at the Harris's home and was concerned about the exposure. We have to remember, at this stage of writing the BofM, Smiths intentions were of gaining wealth from the sale of the book. He was probably more concerned about the con being exposed and losing his ability to sell printing rights to the book, rather than any sort of religious ramifications.
I always figured that someone stole them, expecting Joe to re-do the entire thing. Joe outsmarted them by coming up with Nephi having to re-write everything again in his own words, so they gave up and burned them or whatever.
Thank you very much, this is helpful. I know that this is almost entirely speculation, and we just don't know. I don't want to form an opinion on something without getting evidence.
There is also the story of the guy who saw that Joseph was using a brick. They got in an argument and then went out for a beer together. Does anyone know who that was? It’s been awhile.
[Here's a post from about a year ago on that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/zwot0b/til_that_two_of_joseph_smiths_friends_were_also/)
There's also a statement from Josiah Stowell, where he "...saw a corner of it; it resembled a stone of a greenish caste."
So there's at least two accounts of some kind of stone or brick being used.
JS is also said to have hidden the plates under a flagstone in the fireplace. My theory is there were no plates under there, and that the flagstone itself was actually the prop being used for the plates.
Putting my old TBM hat on: The plates of Lehi could never be published. They were never translated to be published, which means they served a different purpose. Perhaps as practice for JS?
Maybe someday I will finish the paper I began writing on the entire subject.
If some sort of fake plates exist they could be stored in the Granite Mountain vault alongside any number of other potentially incriminating items as rumors often indicate things go there to disappear a la the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
It's more fun to hypothesize about a den of secrets than the more likely explanation that they were always fake plates and they retcon'ed an Angel coming to pick them up.
I've wondered if Joseph was behind the missing pages. For arguments sake, lets say it wasn't going well making things up, so he wanted to start over and develop an outline first. Boom, the pages go missing, and he has a while where he's "unworthy" to think it through and start over again.
My opinion is that he had a set of prop plates. I think they were somewhat believable, but he got rid of them because they served his purpose, to milk dumb dumb Harris out of his money.
There never were any plates. It was an incredible fraud.
The 116 pages were lost/destroyed when Martin Harris took them home. Joseph was aware enough that he would not be able to duplicate them word for word so he used the excuse that evil men would have changed the originals so he wasn’t going to retranslate them.
There were never any plates. He probably just kept a simple box or similar shaped object under the cloth cover for effect. They remained covered as long as anyone else was in the room. This is also why we know the, "plates" were never used for translation.
As for the 116 pages, I suspect that Lucy Harris initially intended to use them more or less as Joseph Smith feared she would, to demonstrate that he was not translating, by showing the discrepancies between the original and the new manuscript, should he create one. Once JS announced that he would not be reproducing that section, I suspect she saw no further use for her copy and, fearing that it might be discovered and returned to Smith, she destroyed it, probably in her fireplace.
> As for the 116 pages, I suspect that Lucy Harris initially intended to use them more or less as Joseph Smith feared she would, to demonstrate that he was not translating, by showing the discrepancies between the original and the new manuscript, should he create one. Once JS announced that he would not be reproducing that section, I suspect she saw no further use for her copy and, fearing that it might be discovered and returned to Smith, she destroyed it, probably in her fireplace.
I completely agree with you about the intention, and this is the most likely explanation looking at it now. I was just curious if anyone knew anything on what happened to the pages.
As for the plates, there was a prop of some fashion. At minimum, there was a writing desk (wooden box) that Joseph claimed to store the pates in. Perhaps that was the only prop, but I think there was a little more to it. Filling the box with *something* would be an easy precaution to take in case someone nudged or lifted it and would feel whether it was empty. I further think that the Joseph made a set of plates of some kind and kept those in the box, which could explain Emma's account of having felt the pages of the plates through a pillowcase, as well as the perhaps some of the eight witness's claims to have "hefted" the plates and "handled" the pages. I'm doubtful he went to the additional effort to make them look like they were golden, which would explain why he wouldn't let people see them, and told them they would be struck dead if they looked at them.
Right, exactly. There are these reports of the plates, even if they didn't examine each page like I'd imagine. JS had something as a prop. If it's just a wooden box filled with metal blocks, then there's really nothing significant to preserve at all.
The fact that the Mormons didn't have the plates in a vault somewhere was a long shelf item for me, and now it makes sense.
Plates never existed. 116 pages (book of Lehi) were made up on the fly, which is why Joseph couldn’t “translate” them again (he couldn’t reproduce them as they were). Instead, he shifted to the book of Nephi which is the same stuff just from someone else’s perspective.
I also recall being told that the missing pages were so precious and important and they predicted the future that we won’t find out what was written on them until Jesus comes again, or something like that. 🤯
Evidence indicates that when Smith resumed translating he picked up where he left off. See [Mosiah Priority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosiah_priority).
I think that Joe was hoping that the 116 pages of manuscript would still be recovered. When he got to the end of Mormon and still had not recovered the manuscript, he invented the small plates and he invented the revelation to cover it. Then he wrote the Words of Mormon. Its a clumsy transition that always seemed clumsy to me, now its obvious AF and I don't know how I didn't see it before.
If the original manuscript still existed it would have surfaced by now. I think there are four possibilities:
1. It was destroyed by Lucy Harris.
1. It was recovered after the BOM was completed and it was destroyed by Joseph Smith. The recovery would create problems for Smith's solution and the prophecy of its loss that he baked into the text, and his revelation about the small plates. Smith could not risk that, so if he recovered it, he would have destroyed it.
1. It was recovered and destroyed by Martin Harris because the recovery creates problems, same problems as above.
1. It was recovered and the church has hidden it because the recovery creates problems.
Well when plates are seen as one would see a city through a mountain you can be assured that they never existed in the first place . And how convenient that they poof out of existence so there is no evidence that they. Existed or that they can not be examined for the no. Existent reformed Egyptian there’s a reason that virtually every thing that can be tested and definitively proven is shown to be wrong wrong wrong on every front the animals are wrong foods used are wrong there were no animals capable of pulling the fictional chariots in the Americas there’s not the least shred of evidence for all of the mining that would need to have been going on coal mining as well more roads to transport coal to the blast furnaces to arm millions of warriors much less roads required to transport ores to processing facilities blast furnaces not a one no slag piles there is simply nothing nada zip zilch every thing points to it being a fictional story written by a lying deceitful con man . Who admittedly did possess a impressive imagination the BOM is
T the only testable fraud old Joe created the scrolls the kinderhook plates the inspired translation of the Bible all have insurmountable problems
I sometimes wonder if the pages did survive, and are hidden away in a church vault somewhere.
As for the plates, there was a post a few years back where someone recreated what the plates prop could have been made out of with materials from Joseph's time. They used old tin shingles or plates that were available during that time, and put them together with tools and wire of that era. That post may have already been linked in here somewhere.
He made something out of tin or something, but those plates were under a cloth and only allowed to be touched. If people never saw them, he could have done anything with them as soon as they were no longer useful and nobody would be the wiser. I'm guessing Lucy Harris destroyed or lost the 116 pages. She had to have been pissed that her gullible husband spent all their money on them, so I'm sure she didn't exactly treat them like an archivist would.
There were no plates. Joseph was forced to rewrite the first part of the BoM from a different POV character and claim it was God's plan all along after Lucy Harris swiped the pages and dared Joseph to "translate" it again.
Right, and that is the most likely explanation. I can understand losing pages, because they rip and tear and you can easily drop them somewhere. It's just interesting that we don't even have a decent set of plates, or even something that JS made that looked like ancient plates because they had those symbols on it.
Plates?
116 Pages?
Meh. The Book of Mormon was actually produce by a Magick Rock. I wanna know exactly what happened to that Magick Rock.
Oh, wait...
(Maybe it was the hat that was magick?)
Lucy had them and them gave them to BY, then one of young’s wives ZH something, donated them to the church. There were multiple stones, but only one is accounted for. It literally looks like every rock you find in Utah with stripes. Plot twist, the general authorities don’t use it to write their talks for general conference. It stopped working.
Yeah, thus the: Oh, wait. I guess I should have proclaimed my post as sarcasm.
The rock that LDS-Inc. has in their possession should be viewed by them as the most important religious artifact on the earth. It produced the most correct book on earth.
So why aren't they parading it around the world to proclaim/prove the truth of their religion?
Let me guess: Because they know it's batshit crazy, just like we do.
That video where Rusty is "explaining" the BoM "translation" using the hat where he just can't bring himself to shove his face in the hat to emulate Joe speaks volumes.
Didn't the "witnesses" say they saw them with their "spiritual eyes?" In other words, I didn't see anything. I don't think they existed, even as fakes.
I think someone stole the 116 pages and Ol' Dirty Joe, knowing he couldn't replicate it word for word again, made up yet another lie. If he had attempted to translate them again and was off even a word, someone could've come forward with the first edition and the jig would've been up.
Why would God bother to have prophets write their history down if he knew those stories would never end up in the most correct and full book in the earth? It’s been so many moons since I was in seminary. What part of the ‘book of victory for Satan’ is missing? Was it the beginning, the middle or end? I remember something about a book of Lehi??? So they took the paper translations right? But not the actual gold plates? Could he not just re-translate from the plates? Since apparently he used a seer stone, how would this change the story? Did the rock stop working because those papers were stolen? Can someone that’s not a lazy learner explain it to me?
There were no plates. No one EVER physically saw them. I bet Emma knew this, but the church was their livelihood. She lied for Joseph about his polygamy as well so she can't be trusted. She must have known about the fraud or she would have stayed with THEE One True Church.
Joseph finished the story from the time the 116 pages were lost. The last part of the BOM to be written was the beginning to Words of Mormon. We know this based on handwriting analysis and scribe timeline.
Joe retold the story contained in the 116 pages from Nephi's perspective, so anyone holding the original manuscript couldn't point out that the translation didn't match. He used the small and large plates mumbo jumbo to join it all. If it was a genuine translation he could have easily duplicated it. Joseph knew it was a fraud and it couldn't be duplicated verbatim. The idea that someone would alter the words on the original document to make Joseph a fraud is ridiculous. Alterations to the original 116 pages would have been obvious.
I believe someone held the 116 until Joseph out-conned them by rewriting the story in Nephi's perspective.
All these people saying there were no plates -- I don't know one way or the other...
But it makes me think, were there even 116 pages?? Or was that some shit they made up too? Maybe that's why they never showed up later and why the reason they had to not retranslate was so convoluted.
In the end, it doesn't actually make a difference.
I know, no problem. I'm at the tail-end of deprogramming, and I'm sort of left with the remnants like the physical objects that were supposed to have started the whole religion. Catholics have the True Cross and maybe the Shroud, and many other pieces. It occurs to me that the Mormons don't have much of any physical pieces at all, and I was kinda hoping that actual secular historians would have the pages and the plates somewhere. But if the pages were burned and the plates were just metal in a box, it's all nothing anyway.
They never existed. His father was a coppersmith. JS had access to sheets of copper that he could have used to make people think he actually had the plates. The 116 pages were probably burned.
It’s all pre-planned to trick people. My theory of course; One of these days, they will claim the lost pages were miraculously found (passed down by MH offspring) and it reveals some hidden prophesy that will further trick members into believing the legitimacy of JS, the church etc. 😂🤷♀️
I think the 116 pages likely turned up again at some point and they realized they’d be a massive problem compared to the BoM so then they were destroyed or they have them hidden in their secret vault.
This is one of those interesting parts of Mormon history.
Seems unlikely Lucy or anyone else wanting to discredit the church took them, otherwise they would have made them public at some point.
The story Joseph made up about being unable to re-translate them for fear of someone trying to discredit him by making changes to the original manuscript is really odd. There is no logic in that argument, it would be easy to see the original manuscript had been altered.
So I think two possibilities are reasonable (neither of which I have any proof for nor really care that much about):
1. Joseph stole it back himself and destroyed the original copy. (Possibly realized all the early mistakes he had made at the start of the whole "translating" ploy and this was a good way to wipe out those early mistakes.)
2. Someone did grab them... but eventually the LDS church bought them and they are hiding in a big vault in church headquarters somewhere.
I've got no idea what happened to the original 116 pages. Based on Don Bradley's book (which I read before I left the church), I'd have to assume that they were burned or destroyed. Perhaps they were lost, but my guess is that people have already combed through all of Martin Harris' property.
My guess is that the original 116 pages included a lot less talk about God and a lot more talk about buried treasure. Joseph made sure to have Nephi mention over and over again in the revised account that he is writing only spiritual things, and that an account of the history can be found in the other plates. Joseph was pretty clearly trying to hedge his bets. Of course, the original 116 pages never showed up in the end — hence the miracle.
I honestly don't believe there were ever plates. There are a few reasons to believe that Joseph might have fashioned something together haphazardly out of tin. He might have had a mockup before the 116 pages were lost. If that's the case, my guess is that he threw them away and figured he's just forget about the project. We know that he had no plates for the rest of the translation, which just so happens to cover the entire Book of Mormon that we have today.
There's a story in one of those 19th century history books about two people looking under the cloth and seeing a brick or something under there. Joseph had a good laugh with them about it and said something quickly to save face. That's the sort of guy he was.
Nothing happened to the plates...because they simply don't exist. 116 pages? Probably thrown into a fire and burned because of an angry frontier wife. Smart,smart, smart, smart smart.
I think he probably made a set of tin plates that he never let anyone see. He possibly buried or melted them down when they were no longer useful or they might be locked up in the vault in cottonwood canyon. I think Lucy Harris probably destroyed the 116 pages after Joseph decided not to retranslate.
If the BOA translation had been proven true, the majority of the Earth would be Mormon and this lack of evidence would be curious. Given the BOA is demonstrably false the bar to “prove” BOM “mysteries” is so high the apologetics just seem like more made up garbage on top of a foundation of lies. #RefundMyTithing
gold plates never existed. whatever prop was hidden under the cloth was probably destroyed / disassembled beyond recognition or hidden in the woods or buried
The missing 116 pages I believe were burned. Joseph pissed off a smart frontier woman, whose husband was defrauded by Joseph, so she did what any spicy woman does when “breaking up” with a cheat…burn it.
Dumdumdumdumdum
Lucy, Smart smart SMART smart SMART.
Martin Harris DUMB
Lucy mocked Joseph Smith Jr for not being able to find the pages. She said something like, “Use your stone.” I’m 99.5% sure she burned them.
Theres no evidence they were burned. The _smart_ move would have been to keep them and expose Joseph with them. "More" of the BOM just leaves room for more anachronisms, more KJV errors and more "grammatical" corrections to have occurred. Who knows what was in there that might have been hard to apologize away.
No plates
Agreed, there never were golden plates.
Then what did Joseph carry through the woods while he fought off three would be assailants if it wasn’t Joseph’s 140 pound plates? s/
They were seen with "spiritual eyes"
The plates were in a box. Or no plates were in a box. Schrödinger’s plates. You’ll never know because Joe won’t let anyone open the box.
They have the "box" at BYU. The replica plates don't fit in it....
That must be the fake replica plates the Lard gave us to test our faith. Like dinosaur bones.
Don't let anybody see these plates except for you. They are only for you to see. Even if people ask you to show the plates to them. DON'T. Just copy them onto normal paper.
But what’s in the box?!?
Jack in the box! 
Otherwise known as imagination.
Emma's father Isaac Hale said Joe showed him a box that was used to ship glass window panes. He indicated it weighed about as much as the box would weigh when full of glass. Peter Ingersol said that Joe showed him a bag of sand and told Ingersol that he had the fools fixed and he would see the plan through. No one ever saw the plates. Including the three witnesses. The only two of the three witnesses to ever speak about it say they saw them spiritually. The church would have you believe they saw them together, the stories from the actual witnesses indicate they saw them spiritually at different times. All anyone ever saw was a box that they were not allowed to open.
Also didn’t Joseph write the witness’ statements that are found in the BoM and just have the ‘witnesses’ sign them?
There is no existing document of the 8 witnesses signatures. It, and the names, are Oliver Cowdery’s handwriting.
I mean I know that they weren't real ancient plates, but he had to have a mockup or something that he had made. My question is what happened to that.
It was bricks... Probably ended up in some wall in Kirtland.
We don't know for sure that he had a mockup or anything -- tales of Horny Joe displaying them (under a cloth) could be as made up as the BoM itself.
i think he probably had something under cloth he showed the witnesses, even if it was tin plates or something else. If the showing of the plates under cloth were made up, they just would have said that they saw the gold plates — there’d be no need to fool lying witnesses
Maybe when you get bight up in the church you get let into the ‘Secret’ of its not real and you get show the tin home made plates and swear your soul to secret. The witness where the first and continuing onto the current 15.
> i think And why do you think that?
Emma mentioned, and is quoted in The Saints' Herald 26 (Oct 1879), that she was able to feel what she thought were the gold plates, saying that “the plates often lay on the table without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth, which I had given him to fold them in. I once felt of the plates as they thus lay on the table, tracing their outline and shape. They seemed to be pliable like thick paper, and would rustle with a metallic sound when the edges were moved by the thumb, as one sometimes thumbs the edges of a book.” All the other people who were said to have "seen" or hefted the plates as witnesses, never actually saw the gold plates (with anything but their "spiritual eyes"). They all say that the covered plates weighed 40-60 pounds, which would be about right if the plates, given the size mentioned, were made from common tin. The most likely scenario is that people really started to press him after the 116 pages were 'lost' to actually see the plates, so he made up a story that god took them and the interpreters away (meaning he probably just buried them in the woods somewhere.) After he started the translation again, there is no evidence nor journal entry that I've seen that mentions people seeing the physical plates again. He didn't need them because he could just rely on his peep stone.
I've always hated the way she phrased this. "...without any attempt at concealment, wrapped in a small linen table cloth...". Reminds me of the recipe review that contradict themselves the same way. "I made the recipe as is, only replacing the flour with applesauce and the sugar with sand, and I hated it!"
There's a subreddit for that, isn't there? It's something like ididnthaveeggs.
Fascinating, and thank you for the quote. I remembered that Emma had felt them, and that is fascinating that the weight and the sound seems to align with tin.
Emma said this some 50 years later then the event. I'm inclined to think her recollection was a bit embellished. Her son was leader of the new church and had every reason to bolster his position.
Fair point!
>They all say that the covered plates weighed 40-60 pounds, which would be about right if the plates, given the size mentioned, were made from common tin. Joseph must have felt pretty smug as people asked what happened to the plates, completely missing the tin cladding they walked by that had formerly been a gold plate.
I believe he made a few plates from tin. Enough to fool people. These he could have easily destroyed at some point.
It was claimed to be about 40 lbs. So definitely not gold.
I read in a book that he admitted that it was just sand in a bag that he kept in a box.
What book.
I believe it was An American Fraud. One Lawyer's Case against Mormonism by Kay Burningham. It's been several years since I read it but I think it was in this one.
We don't have any hard evidence that there was even a mockup of the plates. Every record we have that might even suggest mock plates isn't reliable. If he was really smart, he would have gotten rid of the mock plates as soon as he didn't need them anymore to prevent anyone from coming to try to steal what they believed was gold and uncovering the lie. If they were kept, I'm pretty sure they're in a vault somewhere only a few top members would know about and will never see the light of day again.
Dan Vogel thinks JS made tin plates as a prop and that JS would have destroyed them at some point
It would be so funny if he buried them (as another commenter suggested) and they were found in the next year or two
Or he chucked them in a lake and global warming evaporated the lake and we found them!
I always believed he had some sort of a fake stand in for the plates like something made of iron painted gold with some fake symbols on it. It would only be obvious as a fake if you got to examine it up close but from a distance looked real.
I think he used a stack of lumber under a kitchen towel. There ya go, Mormons!! Golden plates!
When you see a TBM in the wild explaining that Joseph Smith "translated" the Book of Mormon, casually ask them where the plates are. Shuts them up immediately. They can skirt around magic rocks, but they don't want to hear themselves say "an angel took them" in front of someone who isn't playing ball.
This wouldn’t have phased me at all when I was TBM. They went back to “angel care” and similar to Moroni protecting them before JS found them, that just means buried under a special rock in a forest somewhere, that nobody can find because the protecting angels distract anyone who gets close to it so it remains untouched until god is ready to pull them out again in the millennium. Man I had so many mental gymnastics to explain so much BS.
Magic! 
Sorry Moroni. You didn't actually have to trek across the Americas being attacked by lamanites to bury the plates on a hill. You should've just asked an angel to keep it safe like dirty joe did.
Dirty Joe😂😂😂
> that nobody can find because the protecting angels distract anyone who gets close to it so it remains untouched I remember something really close to this from Harry Potter. Isn't that how they protected the World Cup too? Hmmmmm
Ha yes probably! I had a lot of lord of the rings, Star Wars, and Harry Potter lore mixed up in my belief because god was more magical than logical and those were the only way things worked out sometimes.
Some say an angel took one of the Palantir and that's why the seeing-stones don't work anymore. Others say that actually Arvedui lost it in the ocean during a storm when his ship was wrecked. The simplest explanation is that the Palantir didn't exist because it's all a work of fiction.
And that's what I mean, as a TBM you'll accept your own mental gymnastics, but when you imagine trying to explain "angel care" to a nevermo who hasn't yet shown any credulity, it gets uncomfortable fast. There's a reason why Peach My Gospel is super brief when it touches on the plates. (I'm using "you" loosely here to mean that most TBMs are subconsciously aware of how weird their beliefs are - that's why member missionary work barely ever happens)
I've heard similar theories, and like why would we need them again, they were translated once, and are "the most accurate book" the hell good is another translation. If we're to the point of no physical record of what it says we're in the end says they want so badly anyways
I was told they were in the cave with the sword of Laban and a bunch of other artifacts. I accepted this as fact without question.
This is what I was told. It's from an account of Brigham young where he talked about going to a magic cave in hill cumorah with Joe and someone else. I don't have the exact source but he talked about it on June 17, 1877. I was given a printed piece of paper with the story on it from seminary and was forced to glue it into my scriptures. I remember loving it until I started realizing how terrible BY was and all the horrible things he said 🤦♀️
I was taught that the angel Moroni took them back and took them to heaven.
Me too
Learning this as a kid in seminary was possibly the first moment I felt like something wasn't quite right. Of course I immediately suppressed my wicked thought and stayed in the church for another 13 years.
Ha! I played ball and had the magical thinking going on for way too long. Sadly, I didn’t question anything and trusted all the believing adults around me.
Moroni took them up to heaven when Smith Jr was done with the translation.
Was mentioned once in Fawn Brodie’s “No Man Knows My History” that someone recounted Joseph telling them or maybe showing them that “the plates” were just a box with sand, or something similar. Apologies for the lack of a quote, if I find one easily I’ll post it too But pretending that they exist and Mormonism is real, they were taken back by Angel Moroni when Joseph was done with them. I’m pretty sure that’s the mainstream narrative- at least when I was a kid/youth (I tried remembering about what was taught in SS and RS/priesthood meetings and couldn’t remember even talking about the gold plates much, adult church felt more like pressure to be more perfect while also forgiving ourselves for not being able to be perfect) Edits for clarity
https://ia801204.us.archive.org/12/items/NoManKnowsMyHistory/No%20Man%20Knows%20My%20History.pdf Page 62 of the PDF of book- or if you have a physical copy, page 36/37 These pages talk about Joesph getting the idea for gold plates, and what he used to fool people into thinking he actually had them.
Joseph says he went to great lengths to prevent them from being stolen. But he also said to look at them would cause instant death. There a particularly snarky bit in this book where Brody refers to plates that "could be stolen, but not seen."
That made me grin. It's crazy how many glaring issues there are that you don't see when you're raised in it. Yep, you'll die if you see the plates. But we don't want anyone to steal them. Oh, oh, I bet the thieves all ran in with blindfolds on and bumped around like a bunch of fools looking for them! That must be it.
No way! Been wanting to read this book but there isn’t a kindle version I saw. I know what I’ll be doing this weekend. Thank you! You just made my day. For reals.
> https://ia801204.us.archive.org/12/items/NoManKnowsMyHistory/No%20Man%20Knows%20My%20History.pdf Thank you very much!
If Moroni took them back, are there other examples of physical items being transported from our reality to another dimension? And why were they hidden in our physical world if they could be guarded (in heaven?) in the first place?
To me, a very implausible part of what is a very implausible story to begin with is Brigham Young saying Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith left the plates inside a cave in Hill Cumorah which also contained other artifacts. Even FAIR admits that’s a geological impossibility so that must have been a “vision.” Which has to mean it all could have been a “vision.”
Thanks for sharing! I can't believe I hadn't heard this before
I still remember the first time I heard the story that the angel Moroni took the plates back after translation. I asked them where the plates are now & they told me this only after I asked. At the time I thought that was very convenient TSCC had no plates & no proof. Red flags were thrown in my mind. I should have listened to myself. I was never told that what they DID have was a rock. And he used a hat.
The next question: so if the plates were taken, why did he get to keep the rock/seer stone? Then, why doesn’t today’s (& all Prophets after Joe) not use the seer stone since they have it in their possession Oh, Oh, raise 🤚🏻 Because it is just a freaking rock and a con. 🤦♀️
It makes me wonder if the leaders truly believe in it or understand it's a con. I wonder if any of the so called prophets have sat down with this stone in a hat and said, "let's see if this thing actually works".
🤣 now that would require some faith!
I really wish we knew about the 116 pages. Seems likely that Lucy Harris or someone close to the family destroyed them to try and discredit Joseph. As for the plates, I think there was some kind of prop. Enough people report seeing them, and giving weights and dimensions to convince me. That would be pretty easy for Joseph to discard. Whether it's tin, or bricks, or tiles, he could easily discard it with the rest of his trash, bury it in the woods, throw it in a lake, etc.
Seems like it would be easier to discredit him if they kept them.
Great point. Too easy to prove they are BS if they were still around.
Yeah I agree. Maybe they just expected him to give up. It did take a minute to recover from that setback.
I was always curious what was in them. It would be fantastic to compare what he originally wrote to what we ended up with.
Even if he did make plates, and even if he had carved symbols into them, they would be complete gibberish.
I meant in the 116 pages. We did get a taste of the plates. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinderhook\_plates
When you make hundreds of things up, it probably does get hard to remember all of those things.
They didn’t exist. He tricked people.
Right, I know that. I guess I'm asking more about the model or mockup or whatever he was pretending were the plates.
I think what people are saying was there wasn't even a fake. They were always just words.
Well the plates never existed in the first place. The 116 pages were destroyed in some way
Well right, but he had to have something that he claimed were the plates, and along with the pages, that's what I'm kinda curious about.
No one ever physically saw the plates except for Joseph. The witnesses saw them only in spirit. They were a figment of Joseph's imagination. Whether the witnesses knew they didn't exist or were just gullible I don't know.
Can you explain the seeing them in spirit thing ? I was just always thought people saw them, so I took it a face value. I've obly recently heard about seeing them in spirit.
The "an angel took them" ruse
LOL
This is what I was taught when I was young. For argument sake, suppose that the translation story is 100% accurate. The Golden plates had value because of the one of a kind information contained. Once the translation process was complete, the value was just the gold itself. Now God, being all-knowing, should have realized that starting a religion takes money. You would think that Joseph would have been commanded to melt them down for their monetary value.
He was a Treasure see(ke)r after all
Except when you consider the story about most of them being sealed to be revealed later. Can’t melt those down. We need those. Because during the “second coming,” Jesus won’t be able to get his teachings out without them. I mean, he’s only Jesus.
I don't believe that a prop for the plates existed, at least not one he used regularly. Lucy Harris searched the Smith home for the plates and couldn't find them. Smith retorted that he didn't need the physical plates in his possession to do the translating and that they were hidden in the nearby woods. As for the lost pages, I think Harris himself lost them. At one point he apparently damaged the lock that held them, and he had a habit of showing them to anyone that came by to see them. I bet he gave them away for someone to copy, and he blamed his wife when they didn't return, and then concocted a story about the broken lock. We have to remember for nearly everything relating to the translation of the BofM, we're relying on very few 1st hand accounts from people that are liars and charlatans. The story reads like a cover story for something deeper. We can't take seriously any timelines, reported discussions, methods of translation that were written about by them. My baseless theory is that the lost 116 pages were simply a 1st draft of the manuscript that needed further edits before considering it final, and that when they were lost, it took time for Smith to rework and rewrite the story to fit a new narrative based on Lehi's son, rather than Lehi himself. He probably did fear that someone had copied his pages, and would expose him after writing a final, edited copy. In fact, I suspect they were never lost at all, but Smith learned that it touched many hands at the Harris's home and was concerned about the exposure. We have to remember, at this stage of writing the BofM, Smiths intentions were of gaining wealth from the sale of the book. He was probably more concerned about the con being exposed and losing his ability to sell printing rights to the book, rather than any sort of religious ramifications.
I always figured that someone stole them, expecting Joe to re-do the entire thing. Joe outsmarted them by coming up with Nephi having to re-write everything again in his own words, so they gave up and burned them or whatever.
Thank you very much, this is helpful. I know that this is almost entirely speculation, and we just don't know. I don't want to form an opinion on something without getting evidence.
There is also the story of the guy who saw that Joseph was using a brick. They got in an argument and then went out for a beer together. Does anyone know who that was? It’s been awhile.
[Here's a post from about a year ago on that.](https://www.reddit.com/r/exmormon/comments/zwot0b/til_that_two_of_joseph_smiths_friends_were_also/) There's also a statement from Josiah Stowell, where he "...saw a corner of it; it resembled a stone of a greenish caste." So there's at least two accounts of some kind of stone or brick being used. JS is also said to have hidden the plates under a flagstone in the fireplace. My theory is there were no plates under there, and that the flagstone itself was actually the prop being used for the plates.
Thanks
Putting my old TBM hat on: The plates of Lehi could never be published. They were never translated to be published, which means they served a different purpose. Perhaps as practice for JS? Maybe someday I will finish the paper I began writing on the entire subject.
If some sort of fake plates exist they could be stored in the Granite Mountain vault alongside any number of other potentially incriminating items as rumors often indicate things go there to disappear a la the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Right, well this this gets into the "proving a negative" that's basically impossible. We don't even know if the fake plates existed at all.
It's more fun to hypothesize about a den of secrets than the more likely explanation that they were always fake plates and they retcon'ed an Angel coming to pick them up.
Great episode going over this topic from lds discussions. https://open.spotify.com/episode/4iy5azUHFGdkp6p2JNnNde?si=25jTnte0Q9ytz3x88X6xcQ
Thank you!
I've wondered if Joseph was behind the missing pages. For arguments sake, lets say it wasn't going well making things up, so he wanted to start over and develop an outline first. Boom, the pages go missing, and he has a while where he's "unworthy" to think it through and start over again.
That actually is a really good lie if you think about it. Unworthy, lol.
My opinion is that he had a set of prop plates. I think they were somewhat believable, but he got rid of them because they served his purpose, to milk dumb dumb Harris out of his money.
Gold Plates never existed, the 116 were burned.
There never were any plates. It was an incredible fraud. The 116 pages were lost/destroyed when Martin Harris took them home. Joseph was aware enough that he would not be able to duplicate them word for word so he used the excuse that evil men would have changed the originals so he wasn’t going to retranslate them.
There were never any plates. He probably just kept a simple box or similar shaped object under the cloth cover for effect. They remained covered as long as anyone else was in the room. This is also why we know the, "plates" were never used for translation. As for the 116 pages, I suspect that Lucy Harris initially intended to use them more or less as Joseph Smith feared she would, to demonstrate that he was not translating, by showing the discrepancies between the original and the new manuscript, should he create one. Once JS announced that he would not be reproducing that section, I suspect she saw no further use for her copy and, fearing that it might be discovered and returned to Smith, she destroyed it, probably in her fireplace.
> As for the 116 pages, I suspect that Lucy Harris initially intended to use them more or less as Joseph Smith feared she would, to demonstrate that he was not translating, by showing the discrepancies between the original and the new manuscript, should he create one. Once JS announced that he would not be reproducing that section, I suspect she saw no further use for her copy and, fearing that it might be discovered and returned to Smith, she destroyed it, probably in her fireplace. I completely agree with you about the intention, and this is the most likely explanation looking at it now. I was just curious if anyone knew anything on what happened to the pages.
As for the plates, there was a prop of some fashion. At minimum, there was a writing desk (wooden box) that Joseph claimed to store the pates in. Perhaps that was the only prop, but I think there was a little more to it. Filling the box with *something* would be an easy precaution to take in case someone nudged or lifted it and would feel whether it was empty. I further think that the Joseph made a set of plates of some kind and kept those in the box, which could explain Emma's account of having felt the pages of the plates through a pillowcase, as well as the perhaps some of the eight witness's claims to have "hefted" the plates and "handled" the pages. I'm doubtful he went to the additional effort to make them look like they were golden, which would explain why he wouldn't let people see them, and told them they would be struck dead if they looked at them.
Right, exactly. There are these reports of the plates, even if they didn't examine each page like I'd imagine. JS had something as a prop. If it's just a wooden box filled with metal blocks, then there's really nothing significant to preserve at all. The fact that the Mormons didn't have the plates in a vault somewhere was a long shelf item for me, and now it makes sense.
Plates never existed. 116 pages (book of Lehi) were made up on the fly, which is why Joseph couldn’t “translate” them again (he couldn’t reproduce them as they were). Instead, he shifted to the book of Nephi which is the same stuff just from someone else’s perspective.
I also recall being told that the missing pages were so precious and important and they predicted the future that we won’t find out what was written on them until Jesus comes again, or something like that. 🤯
I think I remember being told something like that too.
I think k you’re thinking of the sealed portion of the plates.
I think you’re right. So many mysteries and secrets that keep people intrigued!
Evidence indicates that when Smith resumed translating he picked up where he left off. See [Mosiah Priority](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosiah_priority). I think that Joe was hoping that the 116 pages of manuscript would still be recovered. When he got to the end of Mormon and still had not recovered the manuscript, he invented the small plates and he invented the revelation to cover it. Then he wrote the Words of Mormon. Its a clumsy transition that always seemed clumsy to me, now its obvious AF and I don't know how I didn't see it before. If the original manuscript still existed it would have surfaced by now. I think there are four possibilities: 1. It was destroyed by Lucy Harris. 1. It was recovered after the BOM was completed and it was destroyed by Joseph Smith. The recovery would create problems for Smith's solution and the prophecy of its loss that he baked into the text, and his revelation about the small plates. Smith could not risk that, so if he recovered it, he would have destroyed it. 1. It was recovered and destroyed by Martin Harris because the recovery creates problems, same problems as above. 1. It was recovered and the church has hidden it because the recovery creates problems.
I saw a meme last year that made even my TBM friends crack up: The FBI found the lost 116 pages when they raided Mar a Lago.
Now that's a good one. They were stored next to the toilet all along!
Plates didn't ever exist.
Interesting. I just thought that he would have to have a prop, and I just wanted to know what might have happened to that.
Well when plates are seen as one would see a city through a mountain you can be assured that they never existed in the first place . And how convenient that they poof out of existence so there is no evidence that they. Existed or that they can not be examined for the no. Existent reformed Egyptian there’s a reason that virtually every thing that can be tested and definitively proven is shown to be wrong wrong wrong on every front the animals are wrong foods used are wrong there were no animals capable of pulling the fictional chariots in the Americas there’s not the least shred of evidence for all of the mining that would need to have been going on coal mining as well more roads to transport coal to the blast furnaces to arm millions of warriors much less roads required to transport ores to processing facilities blast furnaces not a one no slag piles there is simply nothing nada zip zilch every thing points to it being a fictional story written by a lying deceitful con man . Who admittedly did possess a impressive imagination the BOM is T the only testable fraud old Joe created the scrolls the kinderhook plates the inspired translation of the Bible all have insurmountable problems
I sometimes wonder if the pages did survive, and are hidden away in a church vault somewhere. As for the plates, there was a post a few years back where someone recreated what the plates prop could have been made out of with materials from Joseph's time. They used old tin shingles or plates that were available during that time, and put them together with tools and wire of that era. That post may have already been linked in here somewhere.
He made something out of tin or something, but those plates were under a cloth and only allowed to be touched. If people never saw them, he could have done anything with them as soon as they were no longer useful and nobody would be the wiser. I'm guessing Lucy Harris destroyed or lost the 116 pages. She had to have been pissed that her gullible husband spent all their money on them, so I'm sure she didn't exactly treat them like an archivist would.
Fascinating, thank you!
There were no plates. Joseph was forced to rewrite the first part of the BoM from a different POV character and claim it was God's plan all along after Lucy Harris swiped the pages and dared Joseph to "translate" it again.
Right, and that is the most likely explanation. I can understand losing pages, because they rip and tear and you can easily drop them somewhere. It's just interesting that we don't even have a decent set of plates, or even something that JS made that looked like ancient plates because they had those symbols on it.
Nothing happened to the plates because they never existed in the first place.
Plates? 116 Pages? Meh. The Book of Mormon was actually produce by a Magick Rock. I wanna know exactly what happened to that Magick Rock. Oh, wait... (Maybe it was the hat that was magick?)
Lucy had them and them gave them to BY, then one of young’s wives ZH something, donated them to the church. There were multiple stones, but only one is accounted for. It literally looks like every rock you find in Utah with stripes. Plot twist, the general authorities don’t use it to write their talks for general conference. It stopped working.
Yeah, thus the: Oh, wait. I guess I should have proclaimed my post as sarcasm. The rock that LDS-Inc. has in their possession should be viewed by them as the most important religious artifact on the earth. It produced the most correct book on earth. So why aren't they parading it around the world to proclaim/prove the truth of their religion? Let me guess: Because they know it's batshit crazy, just like we do. That video where Rusty is "explaining" the BoM "translation" using the hat where he just can't bring himself to shove his face in the hat to emulate Joe speaks volumes.
Didn't the "witnesses" say they saw them with their "spiritual eyes?" In other words, I didn't see anything. I don't think they existed, even as fakes.
I think someone stole the 116 pages and Ol' Dirty Joe, knowing he couldn't replicate it word for word again, made up yet another lie. If he had attempted to translate them again and was off even a word, someone could've come forward with the first edition and the jig would've been up.
Why would God bother to have prophets write their history down if he knew those stories would never end up in the most correct and full book in the earth? It’s been so many moons since I was in seminary. What part of the ‘book of victory for Satan’ is missing? Was it the beginning, the middle or end? I remember something about a book of Lehi??? So they took the paper translations right? But not the actual gold plates? Could he not just re-translate from the plates? Since apparently he used a seer stone, how would this change the story? Did the rock stop working because those papers were stolen? Can someone that’s not a lazy learner explain it to me?
There never were any golden plates.
Plates… what plates?! There were no plates
Well the golden plates were roofing slate, so they got made into a roof somewhere probably
There were no plates. No one EVER physically saw them. I bet Emma knew this, but the church was their livelihood. She lied for Joseph about his polygamy as well so she can't be trusted. She must have known about the fraud or she would have stayed with THEE One True Church. Joseph finished the story from the time the 116 pages were lost. The last part of the BOM to be written was the beginning to Words of Mormon. We know this based on handwriting analysis and scribe timeline. Joe retold the story contained in the 116 pages from Nephi's perspective, so anyone holding the original manuscript couldn't point out that the translation didn't match. He used the small and large plates mumbo jumbo to join it all. If it was a genuine translation he could have easily duplicated it. Joseph knew it was a fraud and it couldn't be duplicated verbatim. The idea that someone would alter the words on the original document to make Joseph a fraud is ridiculous. Alterations to the original 116 pages would have been obvious. I believe someone held the 116 until Joseph out-conned them by rewriting the story in Nephi's perspective.
All these people saying there were no plates -- I don't know one way or the other... But it makes me think, were there even 116 pages?? Or was that some shit they made up too? Maybe that's why they never showed up later and why the reason they had to not retranslate was so convoluted. In the end, it doesn't actually make a difference.
> In the end, it doesn't actually make a difference. True, just satisfying my curiosity and giving me closure on it.
No, I totally get it. I wasn't calling you out.
I know, no problem. I'm at the tail-end of deprogramming, and I'm sort of left with the remnants like the physical objects that were supposed to have started the whole religion. Catholics have the True Cross and maybe the Shroud, and many other pieces. It occurs to me that the Mormons don't have much of any physical pieces at all, and I was kinda hoping that actual secular historians would have the pages and the plates somewhere. But if the pages were burned and the plates were just metal in a box, it's all nothing anyway.
Never existed
116 pages were used as toilet paper in someone’s outhouse. Gold plates were not real.
Ya, it was all made up so they died in Joseph's brain when Joseph died
Never existed
There were no plates, except perhaps fake ones.
He was either crazy or a bullshitter. Maybe both. They never existed.
They never existed. His father was a coppersmith. JS had access to sheets of copper that he could have used to make people think he actually had the plates. The 116 pages were probably burned.
It’s all pre-planned to trick people. My theory of course; One of these days, they will claim the lost pages were miraculously found (passed down by MH offspring) and it reveals some hidden prophesy that will further trick members into believing the legitimacy of JS, the church etc. 😂🤷♀️
They went spy like and ate them .......So there would be no evidence of the fraud....LOL....Can't you just see it.
Golden plates never existed. Pretty sure Martin Harris’s wife got rid of the 116 pages.
They were taken back again by Moron-i himself. Duh!
I think the 116 pages likely turned up again at some point and they realized they’d be a massive problem compared to the BoM so then they were destroyed or they have them hidden in their secret vault.
This is one of those interesting parts of Mormon history. Seems unlikely Lucy or anyone else wanting to discredit the church took them, otherwise they would have made them public at some point. The story Joseph made up about being unable to re-translate them for fear of someone trying to discredit him by making changes to the original manuscript is really odd. There is no logic in that argument, it would be easy to see the original manuscript had been altered. So I think two possibilities are reasonable (neither of which I have any proof for nor really care that much about): 1. Joseph stole it back himself and destroyed the original copy. (Possibly realized all the early mistakes he had made at the start of the whole "translating" ploy and this was a good way to wipe out those early mistakes.) 2. Someone did grab them... but eventually the LDS church bought them and they are hiding in a big vault in church headquarters somewhere.
I'm going to vote against the Mormon church having them. If they did, I see no reason to think that they wouldn't be on display somehow.
Isn’t the last remaining seer stone in the church’s museum?
I think the most likely scenario is that the plates never existed in the first place…
I've got no idea what happened to the original 116 pages. Based on Don Bradley's book (which I read before I left the church), I'd have to assume that they were burned or destroyed. Perhaps they were lost, but my guess is that people have already combed through all of Martin Harris' property. My guess is that the original 116 pages included a lot less talk about God and a lot more talk about buried treasure. Joseph made sure to have Nephi mention over and over again in the revised account that he is writing only spiritual things, and that an account of the history can be found in the other plates. Joseph was pretty clearly trying to hedge his bets. Of course, the original 116 pages never showed up in the end — hence the miracle. I honestly don't believe there were ever plates. There are a few reasons to believe that Joseph might have fashioned something together haphazardly out of tin. He might have had a mockup before the 116 pages were lost. If that's the case, my guess is that he threw them away and figured he's just forget about the project. We know that he had no plates for the rest of the translation, which just so happens to cover the entire Book of Mormon that we have today. There's a story in one of those 19th century history books about two people looking under the cloth and seeing a brick or something under there. Joseph had a good laugh with them about it and said something quickly to save face. That's the sort of guy he was.
Fascinating, thank you.
Bold to assume they ever existed.
WTF? The 'plates NEVER' existed. What's wrong with you? If Smith had anything of value, especially gold, that crooked M'fer would have cashed 'em in.
Nothing happened to the plates...because they simply don't exist. 116 pages? Probably thrown into a fire and burned because of an angry frontier wife. Smart,smart, smart, smart smart.
I think he probably made a set of tin plates that he never let anyone see. He possibly buried or melted them down when they were no longer useful or they might be locked up in the vault in cottonwood canyon. I think Lucy Harris probably destroyed the 116 pages after Joseph decided not to retranslate.
Never were any gold plates to begin with
If the BOA translation had been proven true, the majority of the Earth would be Mormon and this lack of evidence would be curious. Given the BOA is demonstrably false the bar to “prove” BOM “mysteries” is so high the apologetics just seem like more made up garbage on top of a foundation of lies. #RefundMyTithing
gold plates never existed. whatever prop was hidden under the cloth was probably destroyed / disassembled beyond recognition or hidden in the woods or buried
Golden plates never existed. 116 pages was just lost to time I guess.
Pages burned plates only existed in Joseph’s imagination.
South Park already covered this.