Gold Plates Lecture with Richard Bushman

Transcript

J.B. Haws: Thank you for being here. It's wonderful to see you all. My name is JB Hawes and I am the new director at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, and it's my distinct pleasure to welcome you here for our Laura F Willis Book of Mormon lecture. We're so honored to have Professor Richard Bushman here to deliver our lecture, and we're grateful that Professor Bushman has joined us. We're especially grateful to have two professors Bushman here. We're grateful that Claudia is here as well. And I want to put in a plug for this; Claudia's memoir, her autobiography has just been published. I Claudia, so check it out. Join me in celebrating that with Claudia. I think that's wonderful. If you know anything about the Bushmans, you know that they are a team, and so we are so glad to have both of them here. This is wonderful. I also am very, very pleased to announce that we have with this Mark and Laura Willis, who are benefactors for this lecture series, and we're so grateful for their support of the Maxwell Institute. Please join me in thanking them for their support of this lecture.

And one last bit of thanks. But so many of you are here because of all the things that have been happening at the Maxwell Institute over the years, and as I am new in my position, I feel so much of the energy and the enthusiasm for Maxwell Institute activities is due to my predecessor, Spencer Fluhman. Spencer and Holly are here. It is our first public chance to thank them for his years of leadership. Thank you, Spencer.

We're pleased to announce that tonight is the first of a really robust lecture series that we are having this semester, and so we want all of you to know about this. We'll be passing out flyers that you can take with you. We are this semester focusing on the Wonder of Scripture. This lecture series will take place on Fridays at 11 here on campus, in room 3714 in the library. That's the auditorium on the south and just inside the south doors of the Harold B Lee Library, we have our kickoff lecture tomorrow with Tom Griffith, who will be also talking about the gold plates. We are so excited to have this two day gold plate commemorative event that Professor Bushman is starting tonight and then Tom Griffith tomorrow. So please look to join us Fridays at 11 for our lecture series the Wonder of Scripture. We will now have an opening prayer for the evening from Laura Willis. We're so grateful for Sister Willis being here. And then, following the opening prayer, our academic vice president Justin Collings, will introduce Richard, and then we'll have the gold plates lecture by Richard Bushman.

Justin Collings: Good evening. It's wonderful to see such a such a great crowd, although it's not a surprise given the name that's on the billing tonight. I want to begin by expressing gratitude for the Maxwell Institute and it's it's past and current leadership. I'm told that when the Maxwell Institute was founded in 2006, my predecessor, John Tanner, told those assembled that the name of Elder Neal A. Maxwell was the most precious resource that the Maxwell Institute had, and it was, it was given to them in sacred trust. And I'm grateful for those who've kept alive Elder Maxwell's name and his legacy. I love the the title of this series, the Wonder of Scripture, because it captures Elder Maxwell's buoyant, zestful, jubilant approach to what he called the the inexhaustible gospel. Elder Maxwell said, in 1996 on this campus, said, "No wonder, given its intellectual expansiveness, we are still inventorying the harvest basket of the restoration, having dashed about the wonder filled landscape of the restoration, exclaiming and observing. It should not surprise us if some of our first impressions prove to be more childish than definitive. Brushing against such tall timber the scent of pine is inevitably upon us. Our pockets are filled with souvenir cones and colorful rocks, and we are filled with childish glee. There is no way to grasp at all. Little wonder some of us mistake a particular tree for the whole of the forest, or then in our explanation, exclamations, there are some unintended exaggerations. We have seen far too much to describe indeed we cannot say the smallest part which we feel." I can't think of anybody better to kick off this Wonder of Scripture series than Richard Bushman, who has contributed magnificently across many decades to what Elder Maxwell calls "inventorying the harvest basket of the restoration." The awkward thing about introducing Richard Bushman is that, in his case, the old cliche is actually true. He needs no introduction. Everybody knows who Richard Bushman is, but I feel it incumbent upon me as a BYU administrator to note that we try hard to articulate what the mission and the dream and the vision of BYU is, and although he's spent much of most of his career away from BYU, Richard has done us the incomparable service of showing us exactly what that mission looks like, that combination of exacting scholarly inquiry and unwavering religious faith. To invoke another cliche, Richard is a gentleman and a scholar. As a scholar, he is a truly distinguished historian of colonial and early national New England, very early in his career, he was awarded the Bancroft Prize, which is the probably the most distinguished and prestigious award that can be given to an American historian. And he's had another career as maybe the most distinguished historian of Latter-day Saint history that we've we've ever had. Emblematic of that is the publication of his 2005 biography of the Prophet Joseph Smith, Rough, Rough Stone Rolling. He's also been a patron of the arts. He truly is a gentleman, but in saying that his his gentlemanly qualities are really a product of his discipleship. Our BYU mission statement says that "to succeed in our mission, we must cultivate an environment enlightened by living prophets and sustained by those moral virtues which characterize the life and teachings of the Son of God." And Richard, for me, has always been one who embodies Christ like virtues. When I think of him. I think of words like decency, kindness, courage, meekness, loyalty, generosity, nobility of Spirit and wisdom. His wisdom has been manifest for many of us who've been blessed to be taught by Him and mentored by him. And for the sake of any students here, I want to share three personal mentoring moments. I'm probably the least of those who've been taught and mentored by by Richard, but these were, these were meaningful to me, and I'll share them for the sake of students here. Two more brief ones, a little longer. I once heard him say that many people's approach to scholarship is to survey the literature of the field, looking for a tiny chink in the fence, and then to plug that chink. And as I remember, he said, I really dislike that approach. He might have even said, I hate that approach ask the questions that matter to you, and the originality will come out and your response to those questions and the way that you engage with those questions. On another occasion, I was in law school and wondering whether I really liked law school and could make it, and talked about finding an exit route, and counseled with him a little bit about that, and but decided ultimately to stay and to focus on law school. And he said, sent me an email. He said, sounds like a judicious decision, and in the best interests of the family, you will find that you can work your way back toward your interests by many paths, and that was not only wise, but prophetic, that a somewhat circuitous route, I was able to do a lot of a lot of the things that love me, and I'm still able to that I love, and still able to do that. Now this last one, part of the way through law school, I decided I was going to apply to do a PhD in history, and that took some notes, but I had not been an undergraduate major in history, and Richard Bushman was really the only living, breathing card carrying historian whom I knew. So I reached out to him for some assistance, and I wrote a personal statement to support my history PhD application and my impression from having done this for law school was that he needed to write something that was kind of swashbuckling and charming with a bit of bravado and panache. And I wrote something in this spirit, and I was kind of taken with it, and I emailed it to Richard Bushman and Terrell Givens, and then I kind of sat back and waited for. For them to write back a response filled with praise and admiration, and this is what I got in response to draft one from Richard Bushman, Dear Justin, if I were you, I would scrap this statement gets better and start over in a more sober mood, your romantic spirit, and you put quotes around that, which makes me fear that I actually used that phrase in the first your romantic spirit got the better of you on this round. Buy a copy of The New Yorker or the New York Review of Books. Read either one for an hour and then begin again. Committee. Committees will pretty much discount your epiphanies and unfettered abandonment to history. They will want evidence of intellectual penetration. Now you can imagine a very inflated balloon deflating slowly into a kind of rumpled rubber rag on the ground, but But as that stung a little bit, but my overwhelming feeling then and later was one of gratitude that I had a mentor who could could speak candidly and plainly in a way that would help me and help me move forward. I took that to heart, worked worked hard on a revision and sent it to Richard, and I kind of went back in the archives today trying to be a good historian, but pulled this up, and his response to draft two was this, Dear Justin, much, much, much better. I got three of them. In fact, I think excellent. You've hit it on the head this time. You were consumed with the problem, rather than yourselves. That that short commendation meant as much to me as any any commendation I've ever had, because I knew, based on what it preceded it, that it was honest and that that maybe I'd earned at least some of it, but I want to close close with that line, you're consumed with the problem rather than yourself. Because for me, Richard Bushman is the embodiment of someone throughout his life has been consumed with the problem rather than himself. And the problem, fundamentally, is the problem that we try to approach as an institution, which is, how can we be truly invested? How can we seek excellence in the life of the mind and the pursuit of goodness, beauty and truth, while remaining unequivocally loyal to the restored gospel of Jesus, Christ, and not only has been, as Richard been consumed with that problem rather than himself, and he offers us a living, breathing, wonderful embodiment of what the solution to that problem looks like. So I hope you'll join me in welcoming Dr Richard Bushman.

Richard Bushman: it sounds Justin like you're in a position to deliver wise advice, and you're only now. So thanks. It's very complimentary introduction, and thanks so much for coming. It's great to see you all this sea of faces out here. I taught at BYU many years ago, and it's a lovely thing for a Latter Day Saint scholar to teach in a Latter Day Saint University, where you can bring your whole mind into play. All your faith and your beliefs can interact with whatever is being taught. So consider yourself very privileged to to be here. And I'm sure if you seek the Lord's best blessing, I'll help you to do well, find your your place in the world. I want to say I'm very complimented and honored and pleased to be invited to give this inaugural lecture, especially under the name of Laura Willis. Willis has moved to Los Angeles just about the time Claudia and I started a stint down there teaching at the Claremont Graduate University, and so we got to know them a little bit. I always felt a kinship to mark, because I teach at Columbia, or I did teach at Columbia, and Mark went, had two degrees in Columbia. But what do we really remember? Is a answer of Laura's to one of Claudia's questions and moved to town or bought a new house. They needed a place large enough to house the families of their five children, and that's quite a job. And Claudia wife observed that. And bedding all the children down was one thing, but what about feeding them three times a day? He says, that's easy, says Laura and me, at times we just asked the food truck to pull up in front of the house. It's a good solution. Keep it in mind. A the Willis were really far ranging in their outlook on the church and interested also in the scholarly side Latter Day Saints. So I was delighted but not surprised when I heard years ago of their grant to Brigham Young University to sponsor scholarship on the Book of Mormon, which both of them love and admire. Tonight, I'm going to share a few thoughts with you about the plates of the Book of Mormon. I will confess that I feel about my recent book on Joseph Smith's gold plates the way I felt about my biography of Joseph Smith himself. The subject is bigger than anything I put in the book. There is something deeper, more compelling, perhaps more mysterious, than appeared on the pages of that book. But I keep on trying to get deeper into both subjects, even after the book is in print. So what are we to make the gold plates? Today I will address the question of their meaning. Now, how do they function in our faith today? We all know they're among the most exotic of our beliefs. There's nothing quite like them in religious history, and they were a bizarre item to appear in 19th century Earl culture. Where were there plates, gold plates with a history on them? How do we feel about them? Now, after two centuries have gone by.

Anyway. We're going the wrong way. How about that? Okay? To help us along, I'm going to draw on the comments of a troubles machine. Here we go, on the comments of a small group of Latter Day Saints scholars. I consulted while writing the gold plates book, I asked 20 scholarly Latter Day Saint friends to write a couple of paragraphs on what the plates mean to them. All of the replies were intriguing and eloquent, and as a whole, quite varied. I'm sorry to say that the Oxford editor, Oxford was a publisher, was not taken with the idea, and the statements never made it into the book. But tonight, I want to give you a brief glance what my friends had to say. The most significant result of this modest poll that the plates still have a place in Mormon thought, only one respondent objected to the materiality of the plates. All the others accepted their reality as one exception. John Peters, a scholar of media, acknowledged the significance of Joseph Smith's claim they were he said, A Bold Stroke against the flow of religious thought in his time, he observed, I'm going to read you what's on the on the screen, so you can follow me along and check check up and what I'm saying, and I'm underscoring the parts I'm going to read, but I'm going to put some things up there that I won't read, so you can cast your eyes around and see if you see anything more of interest. They were a Bold Stroke against the religious thought of his time. The plates here I'm starting on Peters tied Joseph Smith's revelations and claims to authority, to material objects in time and space, they cut wonderfully against the grain of other religious thinkers in his time eager to consign ritual and history to the realm of metaphor. Smith's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance, resigned as a Unitarian minister at 1832 because he could not, in good conscience, administer the Lord's Supper. He founded in. A historical acronym and a painful impediment. He wanted, a faith free of what he thought was misplaced concreteness, the place. In contrast, as John Peter says, seem to stick claim intangible reality and have a rather literal thingliness. There's a long history since Moroni retrieved them thinking about the plates as things among things like billiard balls, stones and trees. Peters admires Josephus in claiming to have gold plates, but he takes issue with this thingliness, not because he thinks the plates are obvious fantasies, the objection most would raise, but for esthetic reasons. Here's what he says, The fraud or fidelity way of thinking about gold plates has always felt to me like a painful impediment. There are more edifying and less brittle ways of thinking about faith, contingent objects. He that Peter thinks the plates are more elusive than that. Here, he says the witnesses described them as sacred, if bulky objects that materialized and vanished at the command of angels, the ability to see them dependent on the viewer's righteousness, not the natural eyes. He thinks the plates were more grounded than metaphors, but less lead than profane objects. That's what I mean by an esthetic objection to plates that were as solid as billiard balls. Seeing them as things makes them Latin. He is seeking for something more elusive and evocative than a heavy stack of metal sheets. Peters was the only contributor to finesse the question of the plates, material existence. All the others held onto the plates, physicality. They felt the place just went with being a Latter Day Saint. Philip Barlow, a scholar at the Maxwell Institute, observed that my people are given to wonders importance and intrinsic to the stories of their origins, angels and revelations, seers and seer stones, healings and gifts of the Spirit. The Gold Plates are but one among these other worldly strains that's so parla was saying, is what it means to be a Latter Day Saint. You believe in Marvels. Parlor was not tempted to bracket the plates or other tokens of the supernatural, for from the story, they came as a parcel, the plates flow together with other miraculous encounters in Latter Day Saint history, my sister chair Carrie silver wrote that, on a very few occasions, I have experienced connections with loved ones beyond this mortal life, with this evidence of the Divine, it is only A step more to accept that an infinite being could choose to use ancient writings on gold plates as a way to bring forth light and understanding to his children. The writer Glenn Nelson was composed an operatic libretto about the gold plates. Put it another way for me and for the people I imagine experiencing these works, we are so confident in the story that we are comfortable teasing out humor, theater and art from it. They're just part of the world as we understand it. Barlow, seller and Nelson live in two worlds, the world of modern rationalism, in the world of belief, a division. Most everyone here likely understands a world of rationalism, and in contrast, a world of belief, like the three of them, most Latter Day Saints are committed to, a world of wondrous happenings overlaying the world, common sense, rationalism, we have made a choice to live in both worlds, and are happy with this decision, except since always did hours imply intricate engagement with The plates. The historian Jed Woodward said that each day he walks by a sculpture of the witnesses viewing the plates in the bas relief on the wall of church history library in Salt Lake City. He pays them little heat, even though believing implicitly in the reality here, he says, I'm not inclined to pass off the plate. Plates is mere metaphor, as other Christians have done with their secret stories, I accept God's intervention in human affairs, and the plates is an actual physical artifact, just as Joseph Smith and the witnesses described. But as I pass these panels each from day to day, I don't agonize. Are them, just as the depictions do not call forth my resistance. On the other hand, the events in the depicted in the panels do not overwhelm me, either. Despite the unavoidable presence of the plates in my life, they are a distant presence, certainly a relic from the past. God had work to do, and he did it through the plates. God's work today calls forth different methods and means.

The philosopher James Faulkner felt much the same. The truth is that I don't think about the plates very much. I suppose that in their regard, I'm a naive believer. Part of my experience of conversion was the acceptance of the reality. I'm interested in the revealed text more than in the physical objects to which it is somehow or another correlated, or in that correlation itself, I take the existence of the plates as a given, but not one that draws my attention for these two Woodworth and Fauci believe was implicit in their faith. But the plates don't long no longer matter. Much later in this paper, I will challenge this attitude, but I think it is likely that most Latter Day Saints feel the same way. We simply have no reason to think much about the plates. We don't defend them. We don't speculate about them. They're on deposits somewhere in our memories, and that is about all. I would say that all respondents were aware that the plates are an affront to common sense and ordinary reason, but the writers were perfectly content with that. Historian Kathleen flake saw the plates as an attitude for any inclination to make our religion seem perfectly rational. Too many miracles come along in the story. I'm mostly a mood amused she wrote by how effectively the gold plates challenge efforts academic or otherwise, to rationalize Mormonism. And as I said before, most of us live in two worlds, a rational, common sense world on the one hand, and a marvelous world of miracles and gold plates on the other. I'm Maxwell. Theologian Kim Matheson found the demand for a degree of credulity bracing Mormonism. Gold Plates serve as a religious embarrassment, embarrassment of the very best kind. She wrote, they are kind of thing that forced my devotions into tangibility, that wrote me to the material comments commitments of my faith tradition and it prevent me from escaping into more respectable, spiritualized abstractions. Matheson doesn't mind that the plates seem out of place in modern thinking. She even thinks that the plates are purposely provocative. She compares the plates to the resurrection. Here she says, I think of the gold plates, the way I think of the body of Jesus, a tangible and suspiciously absent whose logic crazy and yet laughable but still performs the very structure and faith. In other words, the embarrassments of the plates is in some ways, briskly beneficial they require us to exercise space the plates and Jesus return from the tomb both run against common sense and disrupt our complacent acceptance of the ordinary. The cultural historian Terrell Gibbons argues that this demand is on purpose, perhaps even essential. It would seem that the brute physicality of the plates, their brazen resistance to allegorizing or spiritualizing, has to be the point it would have been so much more prudent, so much safer for Smith to claim the Book of Mormon, derived from a personal revelation or spirit led automatic writing, or, as with dark kind of covenant seven, a transcription of a visionary artifact. Why articulate instead the most testable, the most implausible, the most seemingly disprovable of claims in. Actual plates of gold written by ancient Israelites and hidden in an upstate New York hillside. The art of factual concreteness of this origin story seems as deliberate essential parallel to the resurrection of Christ himself as a scandal of Christianity in Emil bromard works, the resurrection of his assertion that went as far as possible against the universality of Christianity's claims. It was a barrier, threshold that one could not pass without sacrificing the tenacious hold one's inherited cultural and rational suppositions, both accounts early christianist and restorationist defied casual belief or painless discipleship. The fantastic nature of the plates given the same is meant to disrupt our assumptions and require a sacrifice of us we must endure the shame of belief at odds with today's common sense in one form or another. Others asked about the plates providing access to another world. Are they designed to give us a glimpse of something marvelous and magnificent? Philip Barlow, whom I mentioned a few moments ago, wondered, might Joseph Smith's visions provide a glimpse of realities that operate on principles beyond what we detect in everyday life with our five humble senses, like wormholes that warp time and space, or like the bizarre quantum laws governing entangled particles that are like years apart. Judge Tom Griffith, who's speaking tomorrow, felt the plates were all the more challenging because there was a substantial evidence that they actually existed, as with the first Christians, eyewitnesses claim that this modern miracle is a historical reality. Those gold plates were seen, touched, hefted and examined by many who then believed that history had once again been invaded by God and Christ in a way that changed everything. And while we know little about the ancient New Testament witnesses, we knew much about the more risen eyewitnesses to the gold plates who left abundant records of their lives that made them all the more challenging. If it says that the gold plates fraud, the skeptic to allow for the possibility that reality includes God in Christ and angels and moral laws that shape and mold us into different types of being that we might otherwise be, and that God in Christ has undertaken a major project for all the world in our times, plates lead us to a God who points us to a higher life.

The plates is a prod. Turn up in other statements. The historian Matt Bowman wrote that the plates may lead us to question our most basic cultural assumption, the dominance of science. Bauman suggests that science may not be as secure in its foundations as we think. The plates here, I quote him, may be relevant even beyond believers in Joseph Smith's revelations, because they remind the world that our scientism, our empiricism, our rationality, is only one way human beings have sought to engage the world, and however useful it has been, it remains the product of history and therefore subject to its own limitations and fragility. I identify with the confidence of these writers. We're miles away from having made the case that science is fragile and other worlds possible, but these writers sense the potential. They know what they're up against in questioning the prevailing orthodoxy. But given the fact that there is a respectable body of evidence that the witnesses actually saw and held the plates, they challenged rationalists to think twice about the supernatural world. Another category of respondents were less preoccupied with a rationalist challenge than in asking what we learned from the plates about God's care for his children. These contributors interpreted the plate story as they went, a parable the plates remind me, as it said historian Kate Holbrook of our generation. Decisions of mortals, writers, collectors, editors and translators were asked to do more than they were capable of, and agreed to try anyway. They worked without any promise that God would protect their sincere efforts from derision. They worked in fact, knowing that those who found worth in their words, words would experience ridicule with that belief. These gallant souls never believed God would make a masterpiece of their contributions, only that he would augment their contributions just enough to fulfill His purposes. Similarly, Margaret Hemmings, recent editor of exponent two, valued the plates for conveying hundreds of human stories. The Book of Mormon plates bore a record less of God's words than his people struggles. The text is, overall, much more a narrative about people than a sermon from God. Is a record of individuals and societies struggling internally and with one another. A huge portion of the Book of Mormon concerns itself with human endeavors, corruption, violence, slavery, systems of government and establishing churches, the stories of people with all their failings and foibles and mistakes and successes, are sacred, the very existence of the Book of Mormon and Book of Records, a book of stories that is so important as written on a golden place for preservation signals, God's regard for human narratives. All of these, I think, are warm hearted responses the Book of Mormon, from observers would look with compassion and understanding. JB Hawes, you all know. JP Lewis, church historian, added, humans created them, and God impute them the plates with power to transmit his grace in the form of a message that can transform the reader. The plate. Survival and sheer existence witnessed that God had acknowledged their existence, had preserved them, had endorsed them, had blessed them. This really is the story of God's way of dealing with all humanity, the plates show him using history, human history, to reveal himself God and His purposes. Alone among the contributors, the literary scholar Rosalind Welch took off at another introduction entirely, one that particularly interested me. She addressed the mystery of translation. How are prophets called, inspired to speak divine truth via oracular objects like the plates or the seer stones, many of you are aware of the puzzle we now have concerning the plates role in translation. What was their purpose when much of the time they lay covered on a table, under a cloth, was anything on the plates getting through to Joseph Smith when he did not even look at them. How does the eriman Thummim or the seerstone bridge this gap Welch finds clues in the Book of Mormon itself. The paradigm for this account of prophecy is the episode of lehis discovery of the brass ball and his tent fort Thor in new first, Nephi 16 in this theologically and Typologically charged scene, the two figures profit and our rational object seem to call to wood and Luther in their sacred roles. Let me say that again, the two figures profit and a rational object, reading the brass ball seem to call one another into their sacred roles. Each is necessary for the full realization of the other's powers. The Object mediates the prophets romantic authority, or the Prophet's gaze excesses the object's or regular power. A similar account of im prophetic authority is seen in the Book of Mormon, Prophet Mosiah and his interpreter stones, the Jaredite seer and his illuminated stones. And arguably in Nephi and the sort of Laban these episodes, it seems to me, may illuminate the phenomenological process by which Joseph's own experience of prophetic power emerged in his encounter with physical plates. In other words, there was some kind of interaction between SEER SEER stone and gold plates. Comparable to Lehi learning from the lahona. We're not told exactly how translation of the plates worked, but it's useful to compare other instances of a prophet resonating with an object in the two together producing a translation. We don't understand the mechanics, but we glimpse the possibilities. Welch, along with Joe Spencer and Grant Hardy also sees the plates as a complication. They propose an interesting conundrum. How do we understand the Book of Mormon text when we lack access to the original? Most translations can be checked against the original to detect any distortions introduced by the translator. We can determine what was actually in the original and what was added or altered by the translation. But we can't evaluate the text of the Book of Mormon when we lack access to the original on the plates. As Welch puts it, the absence of an authoritative original text inscribed on the plates, an absence in the disappearance of the first 116 pages the manuscript conditions the way in which the Book of Mormon can be interpreted scripture, ruling out interpretive fundamentalism that seats a stable anchoring original text. We can't, in other words, adhere exactly to the words given to the Nephite prophets. When we can't examine the original, all we have is a translated text and one that necessarily departed from the original, as all translations do, mediated social translations of the Book of Mormon, not unlike les bas Paul with his continually revised divine writing, are the only text available for the interpretation. It is a matter of general hermeneutics. The absent plates recommend a mode of reading scripture attuned to plurality, improvisation and performativity. Some big words there, I don't understand them all myself. How much translation in gold plates text conform to one another, we cannot know. I believe it was because of these circumstances the contextual scholar, Joe Spencer, wrote, the plates should be left out of consideration when we approach the Book of Mormon, the task signed in the Scripture itself is to read the book of the Book of Mormon quite regardless of the plates. Under the circumstances space wrote, The plates are a distraction. We can believe with World scows and that the translation Joseph received by revelation was tightly controlled. The translator spoke only what was revealed to him, but how far that revealed translation conformed to the text on the plates cannot be known, we would place a lot of effort guessing when Nephi wrote and when Joseph spoke. It is better. I think Spencer is telling us to work with the Book of Mormon as it is there on that printed page, rather than try to guess a translation Alder to the original Nephite singing along the same lines, a historian of both Asian culture and the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy, elaborated the problem, our English version cannot have been a literal translation of the Nephite record since anachronistic phrasing from the King James Bible, as well as other elements of 19th century Christianity indicate a rather free rentation or an updating of the ancient source. Hardy is not saying that Joseph Smith contrived the Book of Mormon itself. It tells that this is what he says on that point. I personally believe the text was revealed to Joseph Smith in a fairly exact form. Hardy is simply saying that the book of Mormons revealed to Joseph Smith may have been expanded on the ancient writing, introducing a lot of 19th century material in order to reach a modern audience. We don't know how much of the text existed in the original and how much was added in the process of inspired translation. In this state of uncertainty, what is the role of the plates? Should we simply forget them? And chose Joe Spencer recommends in order to avoid being distracted as uh. Being distracted. No already says the plates have a critical function. The plates, assuming they're ancient and construction, would have been evidence to Joseph Smith, his early associates and modern believers, that there was some historical basis for the scriptural narrative he published in 1830 Savannah Eccles Johnston underscored Hardy's observation, the reality of the plates asserts the historicity the Book of Mormon. If these gold plates are real, then the civilizations documented on the plates were real. The Book of Mormon was not purely a 19th century revelation. The plates created a link between modern readers and the ancient prophets, as you can see then the solicited comments lead us into deep water. I appreciate the merit in all of them which sum up I've divided into five categories. One, John Peters prefers to understand the plates as an elusive creation of faith. Two others accept the plates because they are one with Latter Day Saint belief in miraculous happenings. Yes, they're at odds with modern scientific belief, but we as people accept such things. Three the plates are a calculated provocation like the resurrection of Christ, they lead us into a world of divine visitations and miraculous happening challenge. Secular materialism. Four, the place can be read as a parable, faux kind, Heavenly Father honors the life stories of his people. Five, finally, the plates, or rather their absence, complicates our understanding of the Book of Mormon. Without them, we could never pin down how much of the text was in the original and how much translation shaped the results. We can only deal with the text as we have it taken together these comments, every one of them useful, offer a complex account of the plates meaning for Latter Day Saints today, as for my own view of the plates, after reviewing the comments of my friends, I was prompted to ask, what would we lose if we brought the plates? What if they gradually faded from our stories, our manuals, our thoughts, we are certainly not repudiating the plates, but the fact is that they are rarely mentioned in sacrament talks or in any branch or preaching. They are touched on only once in the missionary lessons and then, but briefly, we no longer make much of the biblical evidence from the plates, the stick of Joseph and the stick of Judah in Ezekiel. 37 key elements at one time, given our current lack of interest, would anything of value be lost if we caught them altogether? One way to assess the plates importance to examine him against the backdrop of the Protestant Reformation, one among the many transformations that Protestantism brought in the 16th century was to move the center of religious life from the historical to the psychological, the Catholic imagination was rooted in events headed by the birth of Christ, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Gospel events were followed by the miracles brought by the saints and the valiant acts of the Crusaders. Individuals were elevated to sainthood only if they had performed a miraculous act. Everywhere there was vivid miraculous action involving supernatural beings intervening in human life for a time, every Catholic Church was expected to have a relic under its altar, fragments of bone, hair, furniture, clothing, memorializing a saint's miraculous acts, the walls and windows of Catholic churches were covered with depictions of Moses and the tablets events in Christ's lives, miracles wrought By the saints and the heroism Catholic warriors. Catholics lived in a world of constant divine action, as the political scientist that was eventually said in his statement, Roman Catholics and ether, North Eastern Orthodox have been and still are much concerned. Learned to constantly remind themselves that Christian faith consists of and is also grounded in and rests upon certain crucial historical events. Protestantism changed this emphasis. Protestants were a clinic class. They denuded the walls of their churches, erasing images of events. They dismissed accounts of saints and their miracles as purely superstition. Godly miracles were declared to have ended with Christ and were no longer needed post Christ, only Satan, foreign miracles, if an angel appeared, the evil one was behind it. Protestants gave up holy miracles. Worship came to focus on preaching and the word. What mattered to Protestants ism were the dramas of the soul, faith and the workings of the heart religion became increasingly psychological and intellectual. The basic events of the incarnation, the resurrection remained in Protestant history, of course, but at the heart of Protestant religion was belief and faith.

Latter Day Saint religion unavoidably drew from its Protestant environment. We, too have always emphasized the psychological, how we feel in our hearts and what we believe our crucial life passage is gaining a testimony, which we acquire by praying and listening to the feelings God plants in our hearts as we mature, we seek comfort from Christ, prompt us to do good and spiritual confirmation that our doctrines are true, We teach our children to LISTEN to the Spirit. Following in the Protestant tradition, our religion is practiced today is heavily psychological, by which I mean internal, a thought, heart, the spirit, the mind. But while Latter Day scene, religion is deeply psychological, we also share the Catholic emphasis on the historical our faith is based on actual events that occurred at historical time. We do not populate the world with with either witches or saints performing miracles, but we do believe in angels visiting the earth and occasional visits of the Father and the Son. Our religion began with a series of momentous happenings, the appearance of Christ in God Moroni and Joseph's bedroom and at the hill John the Baptist bestowing priesthood Peter James and John with more priesthood. These events lay at the center of the restoration. We are not purely psychological in our faith. We believe in actual events in time and space that inaugurated the restoration. In fact, the historical events are central to our faith, the Book of Mormon, the priesthood, temples were all founded on visitations from heavenly beings who came to Earth. How do we hold on to the historical events of the restoration, the appearances, the ordinations, the translations, the bestow of ancient records. Over the past two centuries, the historical parts of religion have been the ones under the greatest pressure. A number of the commentators I have discussed tonight acknowledge the strong headwinds of secular material culture pressing against belief in historical events, the gold plates run against the grain, a standard modern truth as to all angelic and divine communications in religion. Generally, the 20th century saw a deep erosion. The faith in the heroic Vince of Judeo, Christian religion, the visions, the healings and above all, the resurrection were spiritualized, transformed into metaphors, stripped of their historical reality. Secular pressures were too much for liberal Protestant scholars in clergy trying to live both in both the realm and historic Christianity and the modern skeptical world. For many Protestants, especially the intellectuals, faith in a series of literal supernatural events simply dissolved.

We still in the midst, live in the midst of that ongoing struggle. How is it affecting? Us recently, a path has opened for Latter Day Saints to follow the course of liberal Protestant and Taves, a highly respected scholar of American religion with deep and sympathetic interest in Mormonism and stole the story of the gold plates in a way that deals with these pressures. She writes with remarkable empathy, of a Joseph Smith, who truly experiences visions and has plates. Is not lying about them. He is not self deceived. She says, The plates are real, but real like the wafer in the Eucharist, the priests and the communicants truly believe the wafer is the body of Christ. James believed Joseph Smith was as sincere as those priests. There were gold plates. As surely as the body of Christ dwells in the wafers, she offers us a set of plates that are real are Joseph Smith, and perhaps for all who believed him just not quite historically or materially real, that is the way we would go if we were to follow the course of 20th century liberal Protestantism. Hold under the plates, but yield a little on their historicity is that our destiny, what are the bulwarks that we as Latter Day Saints, can raise against these trends? Or, perhaps more accurately, what has God provided as a defense of our historical faith, if we look to the resurrection as a precedent for the plates, as a number of the commentators, did we remember all the ways Christ assured the disciples of the living reality of His resurrection, the various appearances, the conversations, the instructions after he died, the meals eaten together? We recall the response of the doubter Thomas Christ invited him to reach hither thy finger and behold my hands and reach hither thy hand, entrusted into my sight and Be not faithless, but believing. To a doubter, Christ offers a touch of His wounds, a palpable, sensory feeling, again in the Marvel memorable scene in third Nephi and Christ's visit to America, Jesus told the multitude to arise, come forth unto me that you may thrust your hands into my side, and also that you may feel the prince of the nails in My hand and on my feet, that you may know that I am God of Israel and the God of the whole earth, and have been slain for the sins of the world. Christ, again, offers touches as the sensory basis some belief. We are not there and do not feel the ones ourselves, but we take the reports as testimony of the reality of Christ's return from the grave. In my opinion, the gold plates are the wounds of the restoration. As John Peters said, they stand apart from other forms of witness in their billiard ball tactility. They were a thing, a heavy stack of metal sheets. Joseph had to look home from the they had to be hidden under the floorboards and covered with a cloth. They were held and balanced on a knee. Moreover, witnesses saw and felt the plates. The translator of this work has shown to us the plates of which have been spoken, which have the appearance of gold, and as many of the leaves as said Smith as translate, we did handle with our hands, and we also saw the engravings thereon. We may not review the witnesses statements very often or teach them in our classes, but they remain there in the front of every copy of the Book of Mormon as a tactical obstacle to disbelief. The gift of the witnesses in the publication of their statements in every book of mormon indicates to me that we are meant to remember the plates, to value them as evidence much as Christ's wounds testify of the resurrection. For me, this is the meaning of the plates. They are the most durable, demanding support for the historical side of our religion, they pass primarily to one figure, angel Moroni, but in leaving space for him, he opened the way for other heavenly visitors, the plates prop open the door to an ensemble angelic beings entering ordinary life in. If we give up on the plates by letting them fall into disuse, never having them in light, never discussing them, we lose the most tangible proof of divine persons carrying history. We risk letting the historical side of our faith slip away. We may not dwell on the plates or always expound on them, but we certainly do not want to forget them. One final comment, I would like to make a point not mentioned by any of the commentators. I am impressed with the beauty of the plates, as described by those who saw them, there were a stack of hammered gold sheets, dusky with age, bound with gold rings engraved with mysterious characters telling the story of a doomed civilization that brought about its own destruction through rebellion against God. For me, that is a glorious image. Add the fact that the plates were a material witness of an angelic visitation, and we have an artifact worthy of our highest regard, the name of Christ. Amen.