![]() Latter-day Saint historian Benjamin Park reports that it wasn’t until 1833 that one of Smith’s secretaries, William Phelps, first used the term “Urim and Thummim,” a phrase from the Bible, “to describe what had previously been referred to as ‘interpreters.’ The back of James Lucas' hat advertises his rejection of the narrative that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon by peering at a "seer stone" in a hat. Lucas and Neville also are open to supernatural involvement in the faith’s founding but not to the stone in the hat. Once Latter-day Saints get into “the realm of superhuman powers,” Bushman tells The Salt Lake Tribune, “it is hard to distinguish types of power.’ ![]() I am willing to go along with the ways of God even if they are unconventional by Enlightenment standards.” I don’t subscribe to Protestant stuffiness about proper ways for God to act and disreputable ones. “They suggest there is a technology of revelation, somewhat resembling iPads, that assists us in getting divine intelligence. They are part of Mormon materiality,” he states. The seer stone, “sitting there like it had just been dug up,” Bushman adds, “drags across the line into the realm of the superstitious.”Įven so, the historian is not troubled by a rock of revelation or other religious artifacts. To Latter-day Saints, the “coming forth” of the sacred text was done by “gift and power of God.”īelievers have known about “the gold plates and the angel and the Urim and Thummim long enough to assimilate them into respectable religion’,” preeminent Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman, author of the Smith biography “Rough Stone Rolling,” writes on the By Common Consent blog. That’s how most scholars believe the faith’s signature scripture, the Book of Mormon, was born. To translate much of the record, Smith reportedly did not look at the plates but rather into a “ seer stone” in a hat and then dictated the wording to scribes. And when the etchings were rendered into King James English, the plates were returned to the angel. In the 1820s, church founder Joseph Smith said an angel directed him to a hill near his home in upstate New York, where he unearthed gold plates containing text written in “reformed Egyptian” - a language no scholar knows - that only Smith could translate. (Rick Egan | The Salt Lake Tribune) Latter-day Saint historian Richard Bushman, speaking in 2018, is not troubled by the narrative that church founder Joseph Smith used a "seer stone" to translate the Book of Mormon.Īfter all, Mormonism began with a “series of miraculous events.”
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