How are the Kinderhook Plates a secular translation?

[_onandagus]

Wouldn't the critics have claimed it wasn't revelation?

If the critics believed it was by revelation, wouldn't they be believers instead of critics?

How does your thesis do anything but buttress the critics' claims that it was not revelation?

Socrates,

Please don't be so literal. When critics say he did it "by revelation"--and they do sometimes use such language--they obviously mean by alleged revelation.

Don

[Guest]

The claim, or assumption, has been that Joseph Smith translated from the Kinderhook plates by revelation--i.e., in the same sense he translated the Book of Mormon--and that assumption was the basis for the major critical argument, as Chris has noted. This assumption is demonstrably false.

I still stand by my claim that this essentially revolves around how you want to define "revelatory." If one accepts your definition, then I suppose you can claim that you have demonstrably advanced the apologetic cause. If you accept my definition, that revelatory involves some purported revelation (in this case one supposes the GAEL would have to be revealed), then you haven't shown much at all.

But there is actually something even more fundamentally wrong here. It's not just "revelatory" that is being problematized, the word "translation" has already been problematized, mostly by apologists in my experience. As a case in point you say the KP case is certainly unlike the case of the translation of the Book of Mormon, as if the translation of the Book of Mormon has a stable description in apologetic and/or believing circles. The translation is both loose and tight, depending on who you are talking to. The plates might have been present, they might not have been. The seer stone might have been used, or it might have been a Urim and Thummim. At times the translation seems to involve wholesale copying from the KJV Bible. In short, comparing the KP translation to the Book of Mormon translation is not a stable comparison, thus I really don't know what to make of the comparison.

While this is a line critics may want to take, it is wrong, as I'll explain later tonight.

Well I look forward to hearing the explanation.

It was both, and it will appear a peer-reviewed article.

Just to be clear, I wasn't critiquing the venue, present your research wherever your want. I was just observing why the venue may be causing some confusion.

[_Socrates]

Haven't the apologists argued that 'translation' when used by Joseph Smith, Jr. and his scribes simply meant 'revelation' rather than a creation in English of verbiage that corresponds to ancient writings?

How does that blurring now fair in the wake of Don Bradley's demonstrating that Clayton used the word 'translation' to describe a process that is attempting to create an English text that corresponds to the meaning of a writing in another language?

[_onandagus]

The claim, or assumption, has been that Joseph Smith translated from the Kinderhook plates by revelation--i.e., in the same sense he translated the Book of Mormon--and that assumption was the basis for the major critical argument, as Chris has noted. This assumption is demonstrably false.

I still stand by my claim that this essentially revolves around how you want to define "revelatory." If one accepts your definition, then I suppose you can claim that you have demonstrably advanced the apologetic cause. If you accept my definition, that revelatory involves some purported revelation (in this case one supposes the GAEL would have to be revealed), then you haven't shown much at all.

What term you use is irrelevant. The point is that the action that will have to be attributed to Joseph Smith in "translating" from the Kinderhook plates is entirely different. Previously the assertion that Joseph Smith "translated" from the Kinderhook plates was understood to mean that he received revelation on their meaning, as he did with the Book of Mormon plates. What it will have to mean going forward is that he compared the Kinderhook plates to another document. You claim this constitutes revelatory translation because that document was a product of revelation. Suppose we grant that the document was a product of revelation. What would the document have been revealed to do? Was it revealed with the purpose in view of translating the Kinderhook plates? If so, you actually have a point. Otherwise, you have none.

To return to your hypothetical revealed Greek lexicon...if you found a Chinese document and attempted to apply it to that document, even if you found a single match and thus "translated" a character this would not constitute an additional "revelatory" action; it would be simply misguided.

If I had found that Joseph Smith received the "descendant of Ham," etc. text by revelation through the seer stone for the purpose of translating the Kinderhook plates, as he claimed for the Book of Mormon, the implications of this would plainly be vastly different than those of Joseph Smith using the GAEL, which was created with other purposes in view than translating the Kinderhook plates and was simply applied to that purpose, and in a limited and offhand way.

Don

[_jon]

What term you use is irrelevant. The point is that the action that will have to be attributed to Joseph Smith in "translating" from the Kinderhook plates is entirely different. Previously the assertion that Joseph Smith "translated" from the Kinderhook plates was understood to mean that he received revelation on their meaning, as he did with the Book of Mormon plates. What it will have to mean going forward is that he compared the Kinderhook plates to another document.

Don

Don,

I'm not sure that's the only conclusion that can be drawn from a single character on the KP matching a single character on the GAEL that matches Joseph's translation of '..descendant from Ham...etc.

What about:

The GAEL was produced from the characters Joseph found on the KP. Isn't that a possibility? He 'translated' the KP and used that information in his production of the GAEL.

[_grindael]

The problem I see, is that Clayton wrote, President Joseph has translated a portion and says “they contain the history of the person with whom they were found & he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the ruler of heaven & earth.”

It doesn't say that Smith compared, and it might be...

To actually translate something, you have to know that it is something that can be translated, don't you? How did Smith come by this knowledge? Charlotte Haven's account says that Smith said he was going to do so by revelation. I really don't see enough information here to arrive at a definite conclusion as to what Smith really did. Did Smith do the translation and then 'confirm' by the Spirit that it was a 'true' translation? Has anyone thought that it is kind of strange that someone would pick up an artifact, think that they are able to translate it because a symbol resembles one that you have written down in an alphabet you produced yourself based on an entirely different language? What are the chances of that? Was Smith really that naïve? That he would believe that any artifact found in America at the time must have been Egyptian?

[_Socrates]

Apart from the descendant of Ham aspect, how did Joseph Smith, Jr. get in a secular way that the symbol on the KP (the one that corresponds to a character of the GAEL) that it was the bones with which the plates were translated was that descendant of Ham being referred to by that symbol being on the KP?

Wouldn't that have been the revelatory part of a translation even using a lexicon-like tool?

[_Buffalo]

So, now that an apologist has found a plausible out for the Kinderhook plates issue, are the rest of the apologists going to finally admit that Joseph did translate them, and it wasn't just naughty William Clayton drunk at the pen again?

[_floatingboy]

what grindael says gets at what i've been thinking reading this and the other thread. i get don's hair-splitting point that it's not technically a revelation specific to the KP. i can swallow that. but the problem i have is this: Joseph Smith was confident enough in both his unquestioned position at the time amongst his followers and in the fact that no one else had the academic knowledge to claim anything different about the "language" on the KP that he didn't have a problem stating boldly that they were of ancient provenance. same as zelph/onandagus. who was to say otherwise? (incidentally i find it very interesting that don's handle is 'onandagus'.)

maybe it is so that he compared the character in question to the GAEL. but instead of making a bold claim that predictably inspires awe and wonder in his followers, shouldn't he have more humbly claimed something like, "after careful consideration and comparison to the scrolls we have from egypt, it appears that one of the characters indicates that these plates belonged to...." but he didn't. and to those who can see the overwhelming pattern in his increasingly self-aggrandizing behavior in the 1830s-40s, this is yet another nail in the coffin.

and yes, i love the point that aristotle smith makes about it killing the whole "the scribes did it" theory about the KEP. if that was just their naïve reverse-engineering that joseph encouraged/allowed in order to develop their feeble abilities to study things out in their minds, then why would he refer to it in the case of the KP? or am i misunderstanding something?

[_Analytics]

What term you use is irrelevant. The point is that the action that will have to be attributed to Joseph Smith in "translating" from the Kinderhook plates is entirely different.

Hi Don,

I think you are overstating your case when you say that the action was entirely different. The action of receiving revelation for translating the Book of Mormon, per D&C 9, was as follows:

1- study it out in your mind
2- Pray and see if it you “feel” if it was right or have a stupor of thought
3- Write down your best guess, confident that false things would have been filtered out through the stupor-of-thought process

“Studying it out in your own mind” is both a secular process and a revelatory process. In fact, it’s conceivable* that Joseph Smith remembered the GAEL’s translation of this character and didn’t physically consult the GAEL at all. If that’s the case, then the evidence is entirely consistent with Joseph Smith translating the Kinderhook Plates in exactly the same way that D&C 9 describes the translation process of the Book of Mormon.

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*edit: I wrote the above before I heard there was an eye-witness to him consulting the GAEL.