Mark Ashurst-McGee is Senior Research and Review Editor for the Joseph Smith Papers and a long-time friend of the JI. He is a co-editor (with Michael Hubbard MacKay and Brian M. Hauglid) and contributor to the recently published Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (UofU Press), which we highlighted in a recent guest post.

If I remember it correctly, I started studying the Kinderhook plates episode in the fall of 1990, soon after I completed my mission and returned to BYU—and there found the magnificent run of BX8600 books in the 4th-floor stacks of the Lee Library. I spent countless hours between there and the old Special Collections (with its stunning window view of Mount Timpanogos).

A decade earlier, historian Stan Kimball had obtained permission to conduct destructive testing on the one extant Kinderhook plate—in order to determine whether it was ancient or modern. In the late nineteenth century, men from Kinderhook, Illinois, claimed that the plate had been fabricated there in 1843 and then planted near a decomposed skeleton in a nearby American Indian burial mound. This was all in preparation for the excavation and “discovery” that followed. The problem was that, according to the History of the Church, when Joseph Smith was shown the plates he believed they were genuine and even translated a portion of their inscriptions. So, were the plates genuine or bogus? ancient or modern? The destructive testing conducted in 1980 conclusively demonstrated that the plate and its inscriptions were a 19th-century fabrication.

In the same article reporting these test results, Kimball showed that the passage in the History of the Church about the Kinderhook plates—which appeared as if it were in Smith’s own voice—had actually been adapted from a passage in the journal of early Mormon William Clayton. According to Clayton, Smith had “translated a portion” of the inscriptions and related that they contained:

“the history of the person with whom they were found & he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”

Kimball argued that Clayton may not have known what he was talking about, and was probably reporting inaccurate rumors, and so Smith had not really translated from the Kinderhook plates.

That didn’t seem right to me. Clayton was a good source. And, I knew Smith had studied the Hebrew language, so I wondered if he had tried to translate the Kinderhook plates by secular means—not by the revelatory gift of translation (like with his translation of the Book of Mormon) but like a scholar would (as when he had translated the Hebrew Bible into English in his Hebrew class).

So, sometime within the next year or so after I had returned to BYU, I wrote about the Kinderhook plates episode for a church history term paper. My argument had two parts:

First, I argued (contra Kimball) that Joseph Smith did in fact attempt to translate the plates—and that he had produced some actual translation content. I explained why I thought Clayton was a good source and probably knew what he was talking about.

Second, I argued that while Smith had indeed attempted to translate the Kinderhook plates, he had probably attempted to translate them by secular methods. I showed that Smith’s translation, which occurred in 1843, did not fit within Smith’s known period of supernatural translations (beginning with the Book of Mormon in 1827 or 1828 and ending with the last known translation of the Book of Abraham in 1842) while it did fit within Smith’s known period of natural translations (beginning with his academic study of Hebrew in 1835 and ending with his extemporaneous Bible translations in sermons of 1844). I also pointed out that—according to Smith’s own journal—when he and others examined the Kinderhook plates, a Hebrew lexicon was sent for. This also suggested a secular approach. It was a natural (not a supernatural) translation project, I argued.

I kept working on the research for this, and then presented it at the Mormon History Association conference in the spring of 1996.

The presentation went well, but there was still a big problem:

How did Smith come up with that bit about the descendant of Pharaoh and whatnot?

Perhaps you already know what Don Bradley and I soon thereafter discovered in answer to this question, but I’ll tell you the story of how it unfolded in the next installment.