To watch this episode on YouTube, click HERE.
Trent Horn is a Catholic apologist. He works for Catholic Answers. He recently published a reel on Instagram aimed at discrediting the Book of Mormon by claiming that our 531 pages of the Book of Mormon would not have been able to fit in an ancient language on the golden plates. It’s a short video, so I’m just going to play the whole thing for you, and then we’ll break it down — if you actually want to see the model of the plates he talks about, you can check out our episode on this topic on our YouTube channel. There’s some weird stuff going on.
“This is a model of the golden plates, two-thirds of which were sealed and allegedly couldn’t be opened. That means there were, at most, 40 plates, each 6 by 8 inches, that were supposed to have contained information present in the 270,000 English words of the Book of Mormon. In order to contain that information, every character on one of these plates would have to represent 80 words. But ancient hieroglyphics don’t work like that. Actual ancient metal plates, like the plates of Darius, only contain about 200 words per page. Smith’s claim that the reformed Egyptian writing on these golden plates were simply part of his own imagination.”
OK, so Trent claims that each character on the golden plates would have to represent 80 English words. The assumption here is that Trent knows how many characters were on each plate. Now, he doesn’t tell you what that number is, but he actually gives us enough information to be able to crunch the numbers and find out. If each character has to contain 80 words, and there are 270,000 words in the Book of Mormon, then we divide 270,000 by 80 to get the total number of characters he’s assuming there are on the golden plates: 3,375. He also claims there were a maximum of 40 plates. We don’t know if that is accurate or not — interestingly in a separate video where Trent debates Latter-day Saint Jacob Hansen, Trent seems open to there being 60 to 80 plates. But let’s just assume there were 40. If we divide the 3,375 characters among 40 plates, then we get about 84 characters per plate. There were characters on both sides of each plate, which means that in order for Trent’s claims to be true, he’s assuming there were only about 42 characters on each side of each plate. That is not a lot of characters, and I have no idea why he makes this assumption other than the fact that it’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything.
I thought that maybe he was just counting how many characters fit on his model of the plates, but I found his model of the plates on Etsy, and I contacted the seller, who sent me better images and informed me that there are actually about 128 characters on one side of this plate. Now, the Etsy characters are made up — we don’t know what reformed Egyptian looked like. Mormon tells us in the Book of Mormon that “none other people knoweth our language.” But in any case, even Trent’s fake plate naturally fits more than 3 times his estimate of 42 characters.
On top of that, Trent leaves out the fact that this model of the plates is not a full-scale model. It’s the ¾ scale model. This whole Instagram reel revolves around the idea that the plates were way too small, but he’s literally showing you a scaled-down model of the plates!
The full-scale model has about 230 characters on the front side of the first plate — almost 5 and a half times more than Trent’s estimate of 42. And the seller even has other models in a smaller font that look like they could contain a lot more than 230 characters.
Trent also says that the plates were about 6 inches wide and 8 inches long. That is based on contemporary reports — Joseph himself estimated 6 by 8, but not all reports agree. Orson Pratt, in addition to eyewitnesses Martin Harris and David Whitmer, estimated 7 inches by 8 inches. On another occasion, David Whitmer estimated 6 by 9 inches. These larger estimates, if accurate, would absolutely affect the amount of content that the set of plates could contain.
Trent also says that about two thirds of the plates were sealed. That matches Orson Pratt’s estimate and one of David Whitmer’s estimates, though on another occasion a few years earlier, David Whitmer estimated that only about half of the plates were sealed. Point being: When it comes to estimating how much content could fit on the plates, there’s a lot more wiggle room for more content than Trent is representing. While both the plates of Darius and the Book of Mormon plates are ancient records engraved on golden plates and stored in stone boxes, the Book of Mormon is ultimately a different thing. It’s a different record, with a different purpose, in a different language.
But setting Trent’s claims aside for a moment, let’s address the real question: Could the Book of Mormon have plausibly fit on the plates? As it turns out, this is not a new question. In fact, Latter-day Saint scholar [Yanna ShudAll] Janne Sjodahl largely answered this very question over a hundred years ago, in 1923.
He took a piece of parchment, 7 by 8 inches, and had a friend of his translate the Book of Mormon into Hebrew within that space. He was able to write 14 English pages of the Book of Mormon by hand onto this one page in Hebrew. Within these parameters, the entire Book of Mormon could fit onto only 21 plates. If there were 40 plates available, they could have used a larger font size, even after accounting for the lost pages of the Book of Mormon.
On top of that, Mormon tells us in the Book of Mormon that “if our plates had been sufficiently large we should have written in Hebrew; but the Hebrew hath been altered by us also….” The implication here is that whatever Reformed Egyptian was, it was significantly shorter than Hebrew — another factor that would have allowed for an even larger font size.
All of that said, Joseph Smith did say in a letter to John Wentworth that the plates “were filled with engravings … the characters … were small, and beautifully engraved.” Eyewitness John Whitmer said that “there was fine engravings on both sides.” And Egyptologist John Gee did find that even this font size is comparable to the character size of many other ancient engraved Hebrew characters.
I think it’s entirely plausible for the Book of Mormon to have been translated from a relatively small number of plates, without even needing to factor in different ideas about the translation itself, like Blake Ostler’s expansion theory. In his video, I think Trent makes unwarranted assumptions, misleads viewers with a scaled down model of the plates, and doesn’t even acknowledge the 100-year-old research on this very question. I think Catholicism has a lot to offer, and I think Trent’s time would be better spent promoting Catholicism rather than criticizing the beliefs of others. That said, people are certainly free to believe whatever makes the most sense to them. I can’t prove that the golden plates were real, but I believe the witnesses. Similarly, I can’t prove that Christ was resurrected, but I believe the witnesses. And I’ve witnessed my relationship with Christ grow as a result of both of those beliefs. Watch this video while you’re here, and have a great day.