Episode 8: How Was the Book of Mormon Translated?

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:11)
Let's start with Robert Frost's famous poem about Mormon history. I'm sure you all remember it. I shall be telling this with a sigh, somewhere ages and ages hence, two roads diverged in the Mormon history, Wood and I, I took both of them just for kicks. That has made all the difference in this episode.
Obviously, Frost is talking about different approaches of the Book of Mormon. Anyone can see that. Few episodes back, we talked about the history of the translation and publication of the Book of Mormon. Great episode.
And we mentioned how we would talk more about the translation part. Well, that day has come.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:43)
Hi, this is Lindsay Hansen Park.

**Bryan Buchanan** (0:45)
And this is Bryan Buchanan.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (0:47)
Bringing you the story of Mormonism from the shadow of the everlasting hills, straight out of Zion. This isn't your grandpa's Mormon history.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:14)
This is the tale of Mormon saints and sinners from our roots until present day.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (1:19)
Gird your loins, lock your hearts, and pay your tithing, because we're bringing you the story of Mormonism in all its paradisiacal glory.

**Bryan Buchanan** (1:28)
It's the Sunstone History Podcast.
Thanks for watching! So the first row Mr. Frost spoke of has a sign reading, Believing Approach. So in rough brush strokes, it is. Joseph Smith is visited by an angel, who's part of an ancient society in the Americas that recorded their history on metal plates. Joseph Smith acquires these plates, along with some other stuff, including an ancient set of Urim and Thummim and the Sword of Laban, which I own, and you can't see it. He translates the text on the plates into English, producing a manuscript. The manuscript is published as the Book of Mormon. There you go. Now, this road is by no means a monolithic road. Far from it. There are books, there are articles, there are conferences, there are tours, and yeah, there's lots of things. So back in that episode, you heard one perspective from Bryan Hales on the believing approach.

**Lindsay Hansen Park** (2:30)
Okay, let's explore just one aspect of this a little bit. Because this is a huge thing, this is something people debate about. I mean, there's a whole like Book of Mormon project nonprofit where people talk about this stuff. I mean, scholars at BYU have been working on this forever. There's whole industries, travel industries related to this book. There's a lot going on. I want to talk about translation.
What does it mean?
Some see it very much in the contemporary sense of translation. Joseph Smith is enabled via Yerm and Thummim, which equals a seer stone maybe, to understand the text and produces an English text that reflects the original. BYU professor Royal Skousen, who is sort of like the OG contemporary voice on this, has argued for quote, tight control of the text, meaning that Joseph Smith sees in some way, including how names are spelled and works with a specific amount of words at a time. There are many other ideas, including the Book of Mormon is an expansion of an authentic ancient text, but also reflects the 19th century culture in which it was translated.
In recent years, the use of a seer stone, likely the one Joseph Smith basically swiped from Willard Chase, has become more mainstream. And this was obvious in 2015 when the LDS Church published photos of the seer stone, which had previously been in deep, deep storage. Like if you were to bring up seer stones, people would be like, stop being weird, that's priestcraft, go practice on your Ouija boards. But then all of a sudden 2015 comes and seer stones are cool again. 2015, it's the 2000s, seer stones are back. Artwork depicting Joseph Smith in the seer stone and a hat is now becoming more common. Fun side note, at Sunstone Symposium every year in the summer, we have Terrell Musser, who is a descendant of Joseph Musser, the great grandfather of Mormon fundamentalism. And Terrell is a stone mason and he gets stones from all over the world and sells them as seer stones at Sunstone.

**Bryan Buchanan** (4:40)
All right, Mr. Frost, your other road. So the sign here reads other approaches.
So let's return to that statement from Terrell Givens at the start of the episode before we go down this road. In the fantastic 2007 PBS documentary, The Mormons, they interviewed Terrell, and he noted, quote, the kind of revelation that Joseph describes is the scandal of Mormonism in the same way that the resurrection of Christ is the scandal of Christianity.
What I mean by that is that on the face of it, that's an affront to sophisticated notions of how the universe works. God doesn't deliver gold plates to farm boys. It's a cause of embarrassment to many intellectuals in the church to continue to insist that Joseph had literal gold plates given to him by a real angel. But I also mean that it's a scandal in the sense that it is inseparable from the heart and soul of Mormonism, that one could no sooner divorce the historical claims of the Book of Mormon from the church than one could divorce the story of Christ's resurrection from Christianity and survive with the religion intact. So in the first letter to the Corinthians, Paul talks about the crucifixion of Jesus being a stumbling block, and the Greek word behind it, scandalon, is where we get scandal in English. In other words, something that doesn't quite seem to make sense. From the time the Book of Mormon was first talked about, various counter theories were developed to explain the book's existence.