The Kinderhook plates (1843)

Joseph 'translated a portion' of forged brass plates by matching a character to his Egyptian alphabet, giving the same meaning the alphabet assigns it.

What the Church claims

Joseph Smith, as a seer, could discern genuine ancient records; his reported translation of the Kinderhook plates was either not his or not serious.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. Contemporary witnesses, the GAEL entry and the 1980 test fit together; the episode is a controlled demonstration of the alphabet-matching method, though it is not evidence of a claimed revelation.

The record

  • Six brass plates were 'found' near Kinderhook, Illinois, in April 1843 and brought to Nauvoo; the Times and Seasons of 1 May 1843 printed them and expected a translation.
  • William Clayton's journal, 1 May 1843: 'President J. has translated a portion', saying the plates contain the history of a 'descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharoah king of Egypt'. Clayton's wording is quoted here from Kimball's Ensign article and FAIR's transcription, not from the manuscript journal. Church editors compiling History vol. D-1 after Joseph's death (Thomas Bullock, 1845) recast it in the first person: 'I have translated a portion of them ... He was a descendant of Ham, through the loins of Pharoah, King of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of Heaven and Earth.'
  • Parley P. Pratt wrote on 7 May 1843 that the plates held the genealogy of a Jaredite back to Ham and that people had compared the characters with the Egyptian papyrus in the city; a New York Herald letter of 30 May 1843 ('A Gentile', identified as Sylvester Emmons) said Joseph 'compared them ... with his Egyptian Alphabet' and found them the same characters.
  • Wilbur Fugate confessed in 1879 that he, Robert Wiley and Bridge Whitton made the plates with acid-etched characters to fool Joseph. Church writers defended the plates' authenticity into the 1970s (B. H. Roberts 1895; Welby Ricks 1962; Mark E. Petersen 1979).
  • In 1980 D. Lynn Johnson (Northwestern) tested the one surviving plate (Chicago Historical Society) by SEM, Auger microprobe and X-ray fluorescence: brass of about 73% copper/24% zinc, acid-etched with nitric acid - a 19th-century fabrication; published by Stanley Kimball in the Ensign, August 1981.
  • Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee (FAIR 2011; Producing Ancient Scripture, 2020, pp. 499-502) matched a boat-shaped Kinderhook character to a GAEL character on the volume's second character page.
  • That GAEL entry, 'Ho e oop hah', is defined 'honor by birth, kingly power by the line of Pharoah. possession by birth one who riegns upon his throne universally - possessor of heaven and earth', in Phelps's hand; the JSP says Joseph likely knew and approved of the volume and retained and used it in 1842-43.
  • Joseph's journal for 7 May 1843 records sending for his Hebrew Bible and lexicon, as quoted by Scripture Central.
  • The Church's Church History Topics essay accepts the hoax and states Joseph compared the symbols with his Egyptian materials, matching one glyph.

The moving target

  • 1843-05: Announced the plates as confirming the Book of Mormon; promised a translation.
  • 1895-1979: Defended the plates as genuine and Fugate's confession as the hoax.
  • 1981-08: Plates are a 19th-century hoax; Clayton, not Joseph, wrote the 'translation' report; no translation was ever made.
  • 2019-2020s: Joseph made a non-revelatory comparison with his Egyptian alphabet, then lost interest; 'did not fall for the hoax'.

The exchange

Kimball (Ensign 1981); FAIR; Scripture Central

The first-person 'I have translated' is a posthumous editorial rewrite of Clayton's second-hand note; Joseph published no translation and dropped the matter, so he was not deceived.

The answer: Clayton was Joseph's private clerk writing the same day; Pratt and Emmons independently report Joseph comparing and translating; the Church's own newspaper announced the plates. That no full translation followed shows only that Joseph got no further, not that he detected a fraud - the Church defended the plates as genuine for 137 years.

What they get right: The first-person History wording is indeed an editorial artefact and should not be quoted as Joseph's words.

Don Bradley & Mark Ashurst-McGee (2011; 2020)

Joseph's 'translation' was a secular attempt: he matched one character to the GAEL and read off its definition ('kingly power by the line of Pharaoh'), exactly what Clayton reports. No revelation was claimed, so no prophetic failure occurred.

The answer: This is the best reconstruction, and it is the critics' point. It shows Joseph in 1843 treating the Kirtland 'Egyptian alphabet' as a genuine lexicon and producing 'translation' by character-matching - the same alphabet and method behind the Book of Abraham, on which every Egyptologist agrees the alphabet is worthless. It also makes the 'scribes reverse-engineered the alphabet without Joseph' theory untenable, since Joseph used it as authoritative.

What they get right: Bradley and Ashurst-McGee have genuinely solved what Clayton's report meant.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

Forgers set a trap and Joseph walked into it as far as the evidence allows us to see: his clerk recorded a partial translation the same day, an apostle and a non-Mormon observer both describe Joseph matching the characters against his Egyptian alphabet, and the reported content is the alphabet's own definition of the matched character. The plates were later proved to be acid-etched 19th-century brass. The apologetic reconstruction concedes all of this and reframes it as 'secular'; that reframing confirms that Joseph's translation method was matching characters in a bogus alphabet, and that he never detected the fraud, which Church leaders went on defending until 1980.

The apologetic case

Joseph never claimed revelation for the Kinderhook plates, never published anything, and within days turned to other matters. The only 'translation' is a one-character lexical comparison relayed by others. A prophet is not required to be an infallible fraud-detector when acting as a curious amateur scholar, and the Church's later overconfidence in the plates was the error of historians, not of Joseph.

What would change this

Contemporary evidence that Joseph declared the plates spurious or refused to translate them.

Closely related

Sources

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