{"id":41023,"date":"2020-10-26T10:12:37","date_gmt":"2020-10-26T15:12:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=41023"},"modified":"2020-10-26T14:41:59","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T19:41:59","slug":"learning-from-kinderhook","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2020\/10\/learning-from-kinderhook\/","title":{"rendered":"Learning from Kinderhook"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"In their chapter \u201c\u2018President Joseph Has Translated a Portion\u201d: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates,\u201d Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee have published the definitive account of Joseph Smith\u2019s 1843 encounter with the Kinderhook plates.[1]<\/a> (See also Mark Ashurst-McGee\u2019s series of posts over at Juvenile Instructor.) The plates were widely considered authentic until the late nineteenth century and treated as a faith-promoting discovery much later than that, and they weren\u2019t conclusively shown to be forgeries until 1980. The last several decades have been dominated by the accusation that Joseph Smith had produced a translation based on a forgery, and the rejoinder that he hadn\u2019t translated anything at all. Bradley and Ashurst-McGee analyze all the sources and determine that Joseph Smith did attempt a translation\u2014of one character. Moreover, his method of translation was to look up the character in the Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language<\/a>.[2]<\/a> It was an academic rather than a revelatory translation, they conclude.<\/p>\n

After several years of seeing the Kinderhook plates treated as the ultimate faith-shaking scandal in early church history, I\u2019m underwhelmed. I\u2019m grateful to Bradley and Ashurst-McGee for putting in the work so that after the better part of two centuries, we can finally learn what the Kinderhook incident teaches.<\/p>\n

What we see most clearly is how Joseph Smith\u2019s assumptions about the Kinderhook plates were formed by his previous experience.<\/p>\n