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IANAM so you’ll get a better explanation soon, but Joseph Smith in 1880ish received a revelation from G-d. It or subsequent revelations led him to metal (Gold? Bronze?) tablets which Jesus left after he visited the Americas (post resurrection in Jerusalem) with the final text of his message. JS transcribed them into what became the Book of Mormon. The original tablets have been lost to history.
PC
Joe Smith made it up.
From www.mormon.org
Regarding the Translation of the Book of Mormon
So, UR; how’s it feel to be in the same company as NewtonsApple and partly_warmer?
Yeah, be careful! Here’s another sample of the company you’ll be keeping:
www.catholic.com/library/Problems_with_the_Book_of_Mormon.asp
"There are other problems with the Book of Mormon. For example, critics of Mormonism have shown convincing proof that the Book of Mormon is a synthesis of earlier works (written by other men), of the vivid imaginings of Joseph Smith, and of simple plagiarisms of the King James Bible.
The only Bible that Joseph Smith relied on was the King James Version. This translation was based on a good but imperfect set of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts of the Bible.
Scholars now know the Textus Receptus contains errors, which means the King James Version contains errors. The problem for Mormons is that these exact same errors show up in the Book of Mormon.
It seems reasonable to assume that since Smith was a prophet of God and was translating the Book of Mormon under divine inspiration, he would have known about the errors found in the King James Version and would have corrected them for when passages from the King James Version appeared in the Book of Mormon. But the errors went in."
So how do secular people ‘explain’ Joe finding the tablets? Seems like a big coincidence.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, vance, but if you mean that Holy Joe “found” the tablets, hence Divine Gift, then to my knowledge, no one else ever saw them (save God and Moroni[snicker]).
So according to the Mormons, there is no contradiction or coincidence.
You display your ignorance with that “snicker” comment, smiling bandit. Try to keep up.
From the Testimony of Three Witnesses:
Those three witnesses were: Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris.
From the Testimony of Eight Witnesses:
The eight witnesses were: Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, Peter Whitmer, Jun., John Whitmer, Hiram Page, Joseph Smith, Sen., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel H. Smith.
So, to my knowledge, eleven other people have testified they have seen the original plates.
Ultimately, it comes down to faith. Religious issues generally do.
As noted above, much is made by the Church of Latter Day Saints of the testimony of three witnesses, Cowdery, Whitmer and Harris that they saw the plates. Not much mention is made of the fact that the three later dissembled, saying that they didn’t “see” them in the conventional sense but, cryptically, “saw them with the eyes of faith”.
Following the initial publication of the Book of Mormon, a woman claimed that her late husband had produced a fictional tract about Christ visiting the new world. She said that the manuscript had been left at the printer’s where Joseph SMith Jr. claimed to translate the plates, viewing them through the Umim and Thumim, or “sacred peep stones” which permitted him to see the inscriptions rendered into English. The Umim and Thumim (I admit I’m not sure if I have the proper spelling) are usually figured by non-Mormons to have been ornamental breast plates worn by the high priest of the temple in Jerusalem.
While making his translation, Smith apparently spoked spontaneously. Some have taken this as proof of the miraculous nature of the Book of Mormon, and some have taken it as proof that he was simply reading from a manuscript. Perhaps neither interpretation is correct. When in the right frame of mind, a variety of people inclduing poets reciting epics, Calypson singers and people claiming to channel from spirits can compose spontaneously with an amazing facility. Julian Jaynes made some observations about this in The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind.
Another sacred text which came into Smith’s possession, The Scroll of Abraham, was not taken back to heaven. In a remarkable show of faith, The Church of Latter Day Saints lent it to Harvard University, which ended up keeping it for several decades. Scholars there were unswerving in their conclusion. The scroll, which Smith had claimed to translate as a heretofore sacred text, was, in fact, just a scrapbook of sorts pasted together from pieces of a comparatiely late copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead. One portion of the manuscript had been pasted in upside down.
The Church later issued a statement saying that the true nature of the scroll was irrelevant, as God could cause Joseph Smith Jr. to be inspired to read a new sacred text out of anything. And I guess they’r right.
The head of the Mormon church is called a “prophet, seer, and revelator”-to me this implies that this guy has a direct line to god. As such, is he capable of speaking correctly? He ought to be able to correct those issues with the BoM, has he issued an encyclical (or whatever the mormons call it)?
I find it puzzling that the mormon church spent a lot of dough, buying bogus letters and documents form Mark Hoffman-shouldn’t the chief prophet have known that these (the Hoffman letters) were in fact forgeries?
Kinda makes the “prophet” title a tad dubious!
You realize, slipster, that now I’ll never be able to read the Book of Mormon outloud without doing so in a Calypso beat. Thanks! {I kind of like the thought.}
A point which has not been addressed yet: some of the witnesses who said Smith showed them the tablets only saw them while they were wrapped in a tablecloth. That is, they saw Smith with a tablecloth and he assured them it contained gold tablets. That they were gold–or tablets at all–was taken on faith. Again: it comes down to faith.
(My apologies for the shockingly bad typing in my last posting. I really do need to get more sleep.)
Since both prevailing theories of the origin of the Book of Mormon appear here, there’s no further reason to keep the thread open.