Joseph Smith's Translations

            I used to think that the original text to everything that Joseph Smith had translated was either lost or otherwise not verifiable except through spiritual witness.  However, we actually do have the originals of two of the texts that he translated: the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates.  The scroll that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Abraham from was thought to have been destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire.  However, only part of the scroll was destroyed.  The rest was taken to a museum in New York, and was rediscovered by members of the Church in 1966.  The scroll came with an affidavit by Emma Smith certifying that this was indeed the scroll that was in Joseph Smith’s possession.  The facsimiles and characters Joseph had copied from his Abraham scroll matched this scroll as well.  There was no doubt that this was the same scroll that Joseph Smith had translated into the Book of Abraham, and the Church purchased it and has it in their possession to this day.  By that time, unlike Joseph Smith’s day, Egyptologists were able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs.  Members of the Church had experts come and read the scroll, and it turned out to have nothing to do with Abraham.  It was just a common funerary text, pronouncing blessings on a priest named Osiris Hor, the son of Taikhibit, who it was buried with, and recounting little bits of Egyptian mythology.  The Church knows all about this, yet they continue to assert in their teaching manuals that the scroll was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire, and as a result, most Latter-day Saints are completely unaware that such a thing exists.  They are starting to be more transparent about these issues, but I had always been taught in Sunday School that the scrolls had been destroyed.  A translation of the remaining portions of this scroll can be found in the Wikipedia article entitled “Joseph Smith Papyri.”

            The other verifiable translation that Joseph Smith made was the Kinderhook Plates.  In his own words, Joseph states:

I insert fac-similes of the six brass plates found near Kinderhook, in Pike county, Illinois, on April 23, by Mr. Robert Wiley and others, while excavating a large mound. They found a skeleton about six feet from the surface of the earth, which must have stood nine feet high. The plates were found on the breast of the skeleton and were covered on both sides with ancient characters.

I have translated a portion of them, and find they contain the history of the person with whom they were found. He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth. (HC 5:372, May 1st 1843)

In 1879, a man by the name of Wilbur Fugate confessed to have forged these plates.  Scientists have chemically analyzed one of the plates and found them to be a 19^th century hoax.  The characters on them are nonsensical and look made up.  Fugate forged these plates and gave them to Joseph Smith to test his ability to translate.  If he were a true prophet, he would have known that the writing on the plates was just nonsensical scratches, and he certainly wouldn’t have come up with a translation for them.  Either that or he was such a gifted translator that he could even read random scribbles.  In any case, if Joseph Smith failed miserably with his translation of the Book of Abraham and the Kinderhook Plates, how can we have any confidence in his translation of the Book of Mormon?

            In response to this issue, some have made the argument that perhaps the plates and the papyri were just objects that Joseph used to receive revelation through, and that the scripture he produced from them didn’t necessarily have to match what was written on them.  The problem with this argument is that that’s not what Joseph Smith was claiming.  In his own words, Joseph Smith says, “I commenced the translation of some of the characters or hieroglyphics, and much to our joy found that one of the rolls contained the writings of Abraham” (HC 2:236).  It looks a lot like he was claiming he could actually translate the hieroglyphs on these scrolls into English, and it looks a lot like his translation was completely off.