Mormon Dopers: What happened to the original plates of the BoM?

Factual Questions
1

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Latter_Day_Saint_movement:

So, where are those plates now? Could I view them at a museum in Salt Lake City? Has any archaeologist ever been allowed to carbon-date them?

2

According to official church doctrine, when Smith was finished with the translation, the Angel Moroni came and collected them and took them back to heaven.

Since this is GQ, I won’t get into what I really believe…

3

Either Calvin Grondahl or Pat Bagley (they’re both LDS editorial cartoonists – and hilarious) did a cartoon showing a woman triumphantly holding up the Gold Plates in one hand. She’s als carryuing a metal detector an wearing the earpieces, and being interviewed by a reporter at Hill Cumorah in upstate New York (where Joseph Smith said he found the Plates). The reporter is saying “…apparently Moroni just put them back inthe ground…”
I’m constantly amazed at what those guys get away with. I can’t imagine a Catholic cartoonist doing riffs on Church Doctrine like that. Great stuff, though.

4

At one point during (Mormon) Sunday school, I was taught that Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery were led by Moroni into a cavern in the hill that later came to be known as Cumorah, and that it was filled with ancient metal plate records of the Nephites, and that this is where Moroni stored them, and that the cavern will remain sealed until God decides to reveal more of its contents. I can’t recall what the source for this was – some early leader, I think – and I may have some of the details wrong, since it has been years since I had that lesson.

Critics of Mormon history generally say that there were no actual golden plates, which is quite absurd to believers. The 3 and 8 witnesses whose testimonies are printed in the beginning of the Book of Mormon are, in some cases at least, supposed to have seen the plates with their “spiritual eyes” rather than to have actually seen them. I don’t know how accurate this is – apparently both sides can find enough evidence to satisfy themselves but not convince the other side, as is so often the case.

5

Even if Moroni hadn’t taken them back, being gold the plates could not have been carbon dated.

DD

6

You sure? Gold is never pure gold. (. . . unless it comes straight from an angel, I guess.)

7

Yes, but organic matter is needed to carbon date things. There was a thread a while back about the potential to carbon date a sword, and it the potential is there, but the sword would have been ruined. It is less likely that the go ahead for ‘religious documents’ would be allowed to be destroyed.

8

they were sold on e bay.

9

A copy of one of the gold plates is said to exist (where I do not know). Supposedly, the markings on the plates werenot egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic symbols, but something called “reformed egyptian”. I am unable to see any reference to such a script being in use in Ancient Egypt.
Anybody know more?

10

Like many other “facts” of the BoM there is no contemporary nor historical record of these "facts.’ Most if not all are in conflict with modern knowledge of geography, history, and other disciplines.

If a prophet predicts that which does not come to pass he is a false prophet!

11

There are other methods of radiometric dating besides carbon dating. AFAIK none of them involve gold, though it may be possible to design a method for dating gold. Such a method may depend on dating trace impurities in the gold, which of course wouldn’t work for 100% pure gold of supernatural origin. Also, it wouldn’t tell you when the gold was forged into plates – it would likely only tell you when the gold deposits the plates were made from were formed. In a religious context, the method might provide more evidence on the date of creation than on the date the plates were made.

I’m not sure where Mormons believe the gold used to make the plates came from. Did Moroni make them out of gold from some heavenly jeweler, or maybe chip some off the wall of a mansion? Or was the gold for the plates specially created for the occasion? The answer might determine whether dating the plates would give the date the plates were created, or the date everything was created. If the plates were made by the Nephites, the date would probably be when the American gold deposit used to make the plates in the cavern was formed. (Again, probably the date of Earth’s creation in a LDS context.)

Dating the plates would probably destroy them, though. I imagine that if the plates were available, Mormons would not allow them to be dated since they would be destroyed in the process.

ralph124c: AFAIK, no script called ‘reformed Egyptian’ was in use in Egypt or America at any point in time. That is, there are no other known examples of reformed Egyptian script. Further discussion of this would leave the realm of fact.

12

Just because this place is supposed to be about, you know, fighting ignorance and thinking straight, and since this was posted in GQ and not, er, a forum called ‘Idle speculation about made up stuff’, I just want to point out that the question involves a premise, namely that these plates ever existed in the first place, and that there is no evidence or reason to support this premise. One step at a time…

13

The “plate” that still exists is one of several called the “Kinderhook Plate.”

It was a phony dummied up by several of the townspeople to see if they could fool “Joe Smith.” They took pieces of tin, engraved some strange characters they found on a “tea box” by “making impressions on beeswax and filling them with acid, old iron and lead, and bound them with a piece of hoop iron, covering them completely with the rust”, then buried it. The townspeople gave Smith a job to find “antiquities,” Smith found the planted plates, and the result was published in a Mormon newspaper of the day.

A copy of the hoax plates can be seen here .

In other words, they have nothing to do with the so-called “Golden Plates.”

14
      • Well then–obviously–nothing ever happened to these plates, for the same reason that the basement of the Alamo never held PeeWee Herman’s bicycle. Who the hell are these people, are they the ones that gave up on Scientology or somethin’? …
        (Oh come on now, you wanted to say it too…)
        ~
15

No, they were Scientology of the 19th century. They got ran off by their neighbors everywhere they tried to settle, hence they founded Utah out here in the desert. they bowed to political pressure piecemeal, going underground with polygamy before officially abandoning it eventually. They prided themselves on being ‘a Peculiar People’ in the 70’s. Now they’re another mainstream corporate church.

A vocal mormon faction used to patrol this board pretty heavily and go off on anyone who dared examine their beliefs scientifically. I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them come along and try to out-shout us soon.

16

I seem to recall that someone had a vision along those lines, but it was never an actual occurrence.

shrug Mormons don’t expect anyone to believe the Book of Mormon story unless the Holy Ghost testifies to its truth to them. Sure, it sounds pretty odd. So does the idea of a man being killed and them coming back from the dead 3 days later and ascending into heaven. We don’t expect to prove it empirically anytime soon, as we think that would probably be counterproductive in a spiritual/God’s agenda sense.

So the answer to the OP is that the angel Moroni is believed to have taken the plates back.

Everyone here probably knows a Mormon or two. We’re not that uncommon any more. I don’t know if you can call us ‘mainstream,’ but we’re a little more ordinary than we used to be. Not that much, though; we’re still pretty peculiar. :slight_smile:

17

Well, based what I knew of the story, I always assumed the plates Joe Smith supposedly found in that cave were real, but probably carved by Smith himself – and scientific analysis might just prove that. So would an analysis of the script by linguistic experts. Didn’t know about the part where Moroni took them away to Heaven. It never occurred to me Smith would have the audacity to base his religion on a supposedly real documentary artifact that he claimed to have found and painstakingly translated, but could not produce or show anybody – nor that he could get anybody to swallow that story. Boy, those Mormons! There’s a word with one “m” too many!

Well, I sure hope so! I’m kind of disappointed no Mormons have dropped in yet. Can’t wait to see what they have to say about this! :slight_smile:

18

Well, claims of the supernatural are difficult and often impossible to prove or disprove by empirical observation. Certain claims can be examined empirically (ESP, for example, or homeopathy) but religious claims generally cannot. Religion is about faith, not evidence – certum, quia impossibile est (Tertullian), certain because it is impossible. For believers, religion does not require proof or even evidence.

Mormons believe the Book of Mormon is true because of faith. For them, this is sufficient grounds for belief, and evidence to the contrary is not generally sufficient grounds to abandon belief. For non-Mormons, Joseph Smith’s claim that the golden plates were taken away by an angel makes it impossible to examine them, and thus impossible to determine their authenticity. His reluctance to show them to others (except for a few witness who give testimonies in the Book of Mormon) is seen by some as suggesting that they were not authentic, and perhaps that they never existed. Actually, a whole lot of the Joseph Smith story can be seen by non-Mormons as ways of covering his tracks – there are quite a few times when evidence he saw disappeared or could not be shared. Some Mormons may even believe that parts of the story aren’t true, but that the belief is still worth following.

Basically, in the presence of faith in the LDS teachings, one believes that Joseph Smith was right, that his claims were true and that there are valid explanations for all the controversial parts of his story. Whether or not the claims are true is not something that can be verified empirically, though, and this is true for all religions. The claim that a certain person or group of people witnessed evidence for the truth of a religion which can no longer be witnessed is by no means unique to LDS.

For each story, it’s not hard to imagine what lies on each side of the boundary of faith. Either Joseph Smith really was reading the golden plates by means of a seer stone in a hat, or he was making the book up as he went along and used the hat to hide the mundane nature of the stone from others. Either the angel Moroni really took the golden plates away from Joseph Smith, or he claimed that they were taken away because they never existed.

Before saying that the former claims are absurd, remember that they are true, possible and not absurd in the context of the Mormon story, and that similar claims are made for other religions within their own context. As dangermom pointed out now (and Tertullian long ago), all of Christianity has beliefs that make perfect sense if one has faith in them, and that seem strange without that faith.

19

Well, there’s my comment above yours. What do you want me to say, exactly? I answered your question, and a lot of the rest has just been so much commentary about how absurd our beliefs are. I don’t expect you to accept them, so what more should I say? If you have a specific question I’ll be happy to try to answer it, but otherwise I have no interest in yelling at you.

CalMeacham, I love Grondahl’s stuff. Bagley is pretty good too, though not as off-the-wall.

20

You know what. This thread is closed.

You want a debate or a fight, take it somewhere else.

Don’t open threads like this in GQ.

samclem GQ moderator