“The Physicality of the Small Plates”

Last updated on: July 2, 2026 at 3:26 pm by Dan Peterson

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“The Physicality of the Small Plates” 2026-07-02T15:26:24-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The replica of the Book of Mormon plates used in the Interpreter Foundation’s Witnesses film project (still photograph by James Jordan)

Newly posted on the Interpreter Foundation’s webpage: The Interpreter Insights Podcast — July 2, 2026: “The Physicality of the Small Plates in the Book of Mormon,” with Terry Hutchinson and John Gee

Professor Gee’s discussion of the Small Plates of Nephi from the Book of Mormon reminds me of an article by Richard Lyman Bushman, “What Are We to Make of the Gold Plates?” that he published in BYU Studies 64/1 (2025): 97-113. The whole article is well worth reading, but I share here only a comment from the Latter-day Saint cultural historian Terryl Givens that Professor Bushman cites, followed by Professor Bushman’s own response:

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 Doctrine and Covenants 7—a transcription of a visionary artefact. Why articulate instead the most testable, the most implausible, the most seemingly disprovable of claims? Actual plates of gold written by ancient Israelites and hidden in an upstate New York hillside. The artefactual concreteness of this origin story seems a deliberate, essential parallel to the Resurrection of Christ himself. As a “scandal of Christianity” (in Emil Brunner’s words), the Resurrection was an assertion that went as far as possible against the universalizing of Christianity’s claims. It was a barrier, a threshold, that one could not pass without sacrificing the tenacious hold of one’s inherited cultural and rational suppositions. Both accounts—early Christian and Restorationist—defied casual belief, or painless discipleship.

Twenty-first century re-creations of the golden plates, the Liahona, the Urim and Thummim, the sword of Laban, and the breastplate, made by David A. Baird, who also created the plates used in the Interpreter Foundation’s 2021 film Witnesses, as well as in its 2022 docudrama sequel Undaunted. For further information, go to https://witnessesfilm.com/.

And here is Professor Bushman’s own personal statement about the plates:

If you want to believe in the gold plates, as I do, a case can be made. Accepting their reality does not require a complete abandonment of rationality. Foremost among the evidences are the eleven men besides Joseph Smith who say they saw the plates. Their statements, printed in the Book of Mormon, were never repudiated. I am impressed that Oliver Cowdery wrote a friend about the experience in October 1829 soon after the vision of the plates was alleged to have occurred. The witnesses saw something.

Beyond the witnesses are all the people who touched or lifted the plates while they were in Smith’s possession. The evidence for Smith having something like the plates was strong enough to persuade Dan Vogel, a skeptical historian, that Smith possessed some object with their shape, size, and weight, perhaps a set of tin plates he fabricated. I don’t subscribe to Vogel’s tin-plate hypothesis, but I do think the plates were a tactile reality to the people around Smith.

Then there was a personal experience with the Egyptologist Richard Parker. While I was at Brown University on a fellowship in 1965, I asked Parker, a member of the faculty, about an article by Ariel Crowley on the Anthon Transcript. Crowley examined the characters copied from the plates for Martin Harris to show to the Columbia linguist Charles Anthon. Crowley compared each character on the transcript to characters from Egyptian lexicons. Every one of over two hundred characters had an Egyptian equivalent.8 When I called on Parker to ask about the validity of Crowley’s argument, I was surprised to learn that Parker himself had helped Crowley locate the characters. Were they really Egyptian? I asked. Not really, he said. They were more like Meroitic, an upper Nile language that was written in Egyptian characters but was an independent tongue. That seemed to me to fit the idea of Hebrew being written in Egyptian as the Book of Mormon describes its own text. The experience left me with a conviction that Joseph had access to Egyptian from somewhere, and perhaps it was from the plates. All of this—the witnesses, the many touches and lifts, and the Anthon characters—makes an argument for the plates that I can buy.

In addition, the plates are embedded in a story that concludes with a published text, the Book of Mormon, which is itself a marvel. I cannot conceive of Joseph Smith writing that book on his own. It is too complex, too weird, too compelling to be a product of his twenty-four-year-old mind. For me, the book’s text disrupts any simple explanation of its origins. Adding gold plates and an inspired translation to the mix seems to me in keeping with the extraordinary nature of the book.

I have lived with the gold plates long enough—all my life—not to be offended by their existence. They seem beautiful and strange in a wonderful way. They don’t strike me as an excrescence or offense. A gold book telling the story of two fallen civilizations written in a mysterious hybrid of Egyptian and Hebrew is astounding. It is a fitting introduction to the unusual qualities of Mormon theology. I am happy to live in a world I share with the gold plates.

Laie, Oahu, Hawaii, as seen from the air. This is where the Hawaii campus of Brigham Young University, the Polynesian Cultural Center, and the Laie Hawaii Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are located. (public domain photograph from the BYU-H website). Iam Tongi grew up very near Laie.

“Iam Tongi to Headline 2026 Utah Area YSA Conference in August: The winner of Season 21 of ‘American Idol’ will be joined by special guest the King will come”

If you can make it through Brother Tongi’s audition for American Idol without tearing up, you’re even more of a cold-hearted, callous, and unemotional piece of stone than I am: “Iam Tongi Makes The Judges Cry With “Monsters” And His Emotional Story – American Idol 2023″

The San Diego California Temple in an iPhone photo taken a while back — prior to recent renovations — by my wife after we had attended a session there.

Catholic Answers is a Roman Catholic apologetics organization that not only defends Catholic truth claims but sometimes also criticizes the truth claims of non-Catholic faiths, Christian and otherwise. Recently, their director of publishing, Todd Aglialoro, who lives in the San Diego area, attended the public open house of the San Diego California Temple of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is soon to be rededicated after undergoing a major renovation. Mr. Aglialoro was not favorably impressed. The temple’s interior did not resemble that of a Catholic cathedral; instead of the large hall that he expected, it was made up of a multitude of smaller rooms that, he implies, lacked good artistic taste. (I’m reminded of an article published in the student newspaper of [Catholic] Georgetown University many years ago when the newly-completed Washington DC Temple had its first open house. The Georgetown writer referred to the Temple there, quite dismissively, as “God’s hotel-motel in suburban Maryland,” or something to that effect.) Anyway, here’s what Mr. Aglialoro wrote about his experience: “I went inside the Mormon temple.”

The response from Catholic Answers to a temple of the Latter-day Saints isn’t especially surprising. Our unaccountable failure to think and believe and build in lockstep with mainstream Christianity continues to lose us points with many outside observers. Which is why this article, from Baptist News Global, pleasantly surprised me just a bit: “First they came for the Mormons”

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