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Podcast Transcript:
So we get comments ALL THE TIME claiming that the witnesses of the Book of Mormon plates never actually saw the plates. The claim is that it was just a vision, or entrancement, or imagination, or the “eye of faith.” An antagonistic document called the CES Letter conveniently supplies a list of sources for this claim. We went over some of them in the last episode, we’re going over the rest today.
The first quote (attributed to Martin Harris) reads, “I never saw the plates, only in a visionary or entranced state.” The second quote (also attributed to Martin Harris) reads, “While praying, I passed into a state of entrancement, and in that state I saw the angel and the plates.”
For some reason, when you look at these quotes in the CES Letter, they’re portrayed as two separate quotes, but that fact is that they’re literally from the same paragraph of the same book by Anthony Metcalf—who left the Church in 1870. Metcalf claimed to have interviewed Martin Harris in the winter of 1875/76, which would have been an interview with a corpse, because Martin died in the summer of ‘75. The actual interview probably happened in the winter of 1873, when Martin would have been about 90 years old — but the first time we hear about it is long after Martin’s death, in Metcalf’s 1888 book describing his disaffection from the Church. No other source that I’ve seen uses the term “entrancement,” thus, I think this is probably an embellishment on Metcalf’s part.
There is more support for the idea that the witnesses described their experience as a vision. For example, in another quote from the CES Letter, David Whitmer (according to his interviewer, Zenas Gurley) used the phrase “as shown in the vision” to describe his experience. I have absolutely zero problem with this. Describing something as a vision does not mean the experience wasn’t real. We refer to Joseph Smith’s “first vision” as a vision, but we also believe it was a real, physical experience. David Whitmer actually directly addressed this criticism in a letter to the first source we just talked about, Anthony Metcalf. David wrote:
“…everything was as natural to us, as it is at any time. Martin Harris, you say, called it ‘being in vision.’ We read in the Scriptures, Cornelius saw, in a vision, an angel of God, Daniel saw an angel in a vision … A bright light enveloped us where we were … and there in a vision, or in the spirit, we saw and heard just as it is stated in my testimony in the Book of Mormon.”
Next quote: In an 1838 letter, disaffected member Stephen Burnett wrote, “I came to hear Martin Harris state in public that he never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination….” Even the well-known critic Dan Vogel acknowledges in Early Mormon Documents vol. 2, pg. 291 that “The word ‘imagination’” here likely did not come from Martin, but was an embellishment by Burnett.
Burnett also reported that Martin “said he had hefted the plates repeatedly in a box with only a tablecloth or a handkerchief over them, but he never saw them only as he saw a city through a mountain.” I think Burnett is conflating stories here. During the translation of the plates, Martin wasn’t allowed to see them. He saw them covered by a cloth and hefted them while they were in a box — it wasn’t until after the translation was complete that an angel showed the witnesses the plates. Burnett is probably blending together Martin’s pre and post-translation experiences. As scholar Richarl Lloyd Anderson wrote, “Martin’s candid denial of seeing the plates while translating was sometimes exaggerated into a denial of ever seeing the plates….”
As for the “city through a mountain” line, nobody really seems to know what that even means, which is further evidence to me that Burnett’s recollection is probably garbled. But I do have two theories. They are speculative, but I’ll run them by you and you can decide what to do with them.
Theory 1: Martin might have been making a reference to the story of Elijah in 2 Kings 6. In the story, a Syrian army is surrounding a city. Elijah and his servant are on a nearby mountain. They see the army and Elijah says, “Do not fear, for those who are with us are more than those who are with them.” Elijah then prays that his servant’s eyes may be opened that he may see. The servant then sees that the mountain was full of angelic chariots. Maybe Martin was trying to say, “I am like Elijah’s servant on the mountain near the city whose eyes were opened so that he might see the angels.” Of course, the assumption is that Burnett drastically garbled Martin’s biblical reference here.
Theory 2: Perhaps Martin was simply trying to say that he had caught a glimpse of the plates through a gap in whatever cloth was covering the plates. Perhaps the folds of the cloth were the “mountains,” and the “city” was a limited, accidental view of the plates.
But anyway, long story short, Martin apparently felt that Burnett was misrepresenting whatever he may have actually said, because, as Burnett reports, “after we were done speaking M Harris arose & said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon for he knew it was true….” That he was misrepresented is further evidenced by the fact that others in this same meeting, like Joseph Coe and Cyrus Smalling, defended Martin, and left the meeting still believing in the Book of Mormon.
Next quote: The CES Letter also lists a quote from John A. Clark in which he quotes Martin Harris as saying, “I saw them [the plates] with the eye of faith.” This isn’t something John Clark heard Martin say first-hand. It’s being filtered through at least both Clark himself and his source, who, as noted in Clark’s incredibly antagonistic book, was an unnamed “gentleman in Palmyra”. Thus, we have no idea who this claim is ultimately coming from, or how accurate it is. But it’s also worth noting that the full quote adds the detail that when Martin saw the plates here with the “eye of faith,” they were covered with a cloth. Again, I think Martin’s pre-translation experiences with the covered plates are being blended with his post-translation witness when he saw them uncovered.
The CES Letter also says that there was another Palmyra resident who said that Harris saw the plates with “the eye of faith,” But when you follow the sources, you’ll find that these two references are actually one and the same—it’s the same John A. Clark reference, repeated.
Why is the same quote referenced twice? Well, it appears that the latter reference about “another Palmyra resident” who referred to the eye of faith, was just copied and pasted from an anti-Latter-day Saint website called MormonThink, and the author of the CES Letter probably didn’t bother to check the sources. If he had, he would have found that it was just John A Clark again. That kind of methodology should frankly raise some red flags, especially because this isn’t the only time this happens.
Here’s the deal: You can believe whatever you want. But when it comes to understanding history, just the fact that contradictory sources like these exist isn’t enough. They may provide a quick way for critics to shrug off the witnesses, but when we take the time to analyze the strength of these statements and compare them to all of the other statements from the witnesses and all of the other things we know they did or didn’t do, in my opinion, these critical quotes lose their bite. The witnesses knew what they saw, and they testified of those things throughout the rest of their lives. One of my favorite accounts comes from David Whitmer’s grandson, who wrote in a personal letter in 1899,
“‘I have begged him to unfold the fraud in the case, and he had all to gain and nothing to lose, but speak the word if he thought so. But he has described the scene to me many times, of his vision about noon in an open pasture. There is only one explanation barring an actual miracle, and that is this: If that vision was not real, it was HYPNOTISM, it was real to grandfather IN FACT.’”
Now, if you’re wondering why we didn’t specifically address the claim that Martin Harris said he only saw the plates through “spiritual eyes,” it’s not because we’re ignoring it. It’s because episode 16 of this podcast was all about those claims. Check it out, and have a great day.