By Mark Ashurst-McGee

Part 1; Part 2; Part 3

In the previous installments of this series, I have given a brief history of the research Don Bradley and I have been conducting over the last three decades on the Kinderhook plates episode in early Mormon history.

Now, we have finally published a scholarly version of our research as a chapter in the newly released Producing Ancient Scripture.

FYI, here is the full citation:

Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, “‘President Joseph Has Translated a Portion’: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates,” chapter 17 in Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity, edited by Michael Hubbard MacKay, Mark Ashurst- McGee, and Brian M. Hauglid (Salt Lake City, Utah: The University of Utah Press, 2020), 452–523.

The chapter, which closely examines each of the key sources for the Kinderhook plates episode, is over seventy pages in length. It is full of new details with which I’ll not regale you here. But allow me to mention just one of these new things, about which we’re quite excited.

The chapter includes, courtesy of the Church History Library, the complete William Clayton journal entry for 1 May 1843—the entry in which Clayton wrote about the Kinderhook plates and Smith having translated a “portion” of the plates and what he had to say about them. We have furnished the reader with both an image and transcript of the full journal entry, which has never before been published. The full entry, with its tracing of one of the plates, includes some new and relevant information that is assessed in the chapter.

I’m now going to just skip ahead to the key section of our conclusion (slightly adapted here), in which we summarize our reconstruction of the most plausible translation scenario:

Examining the Kinderhook plates and their characters, Joseph Smith believed he saw similarities to the “Reformed Egyptian” characters of the plates of the Book of Mormon or to the Egyptian characters of the papyri of the Book of Abraham (or both). Smith apparently believed that the Kinderhook plates were inscribed in Egyptian, or some form of Egyptian, or some closely related language for which it would be profitable to compare the characters on the plates with the characters in the Egyptian Alphabet book. Smith may also have sought to compare the characters on the plates with Hebrew characters.

As when he approached his translation of the Book of Abraham—with a preliminary translation to determine the authorship of the papyri—Smith may have attempted a preliminary translation of the Kinderhook plates to determine their authorship or basic content (or both).

Surveying the plates, he searched for clues as to what might be the beginning of the record and noticed that one side of one of the plates had a heading that was significantly larger than the others, was comprised of characters instead of illustrative figures, and featured characters that were significantly larger than the other characters on the plates.

Taking the plate with the largest characters in the largest heading, Smith focused on the first of these two characters and began searching through the Egyptian Alphabet book for a comparable character. A few pages into the book, he found a character similar in shape.

The corresponding definition did not supply a personal name (like Mormon or Abraham), but it did apply well to a person, providing information regarding this person’s lineage, royal status, and divine blessings. The definition effectively situated the deceased person with whom the plates were found within Smith’s scriptural cosmos.

Smith concluded that he had arrived at an adequate identification of the author of the plates and therefore deemed the definition valid and usable for translation.

Smith slightly adapted the raw content of the provided definition to produce a sensible translation of the character.

That’s what we think, and we wanted to share it with you.

We would love to hear what you think.