How did Joseph Smith translate the Book of Mormon?
Let’s have a look at this controversial topic.
A Mormon missionary will tell you that Joseph Smith translated the Book of Mormon from the Golden Plates, which were inscribed in ancient reformed Egyptian hieroglyphs. But according to David Whitmer, who was one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon,
“Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face … A piece of something resembling parchment would appear… One character at a time would appear, …, then it would disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear, Thus the Book of Mormons was translated by the gift and power of God, and not by any power of man.”
This is the actual seer stone Joseph Smith used as released by the LDS church.
This is the seer stone that Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon | LDS.org
So why don’t the Mormon Missionaries tell you this? Is it because it is a bit weird? A bit Crazy, perhaps!
The Church says that the Book of Mormon is of divine origins, and that Joseph Smith, or any other person, was incapable of inventing a document of such length and complexity.
Members of the LDS Church often say they believe in the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. They say “How could a young farm boy have written a long, complex, flawless religious text like the Book of Mormon? If Joseph could not have written the book on his own, his story of the golden plates and the angel must be true,” they say.
The first edition of the Book of Mormon, written in 1830 had many grammatical errors. This alone questions whether the text was written by man or translated divinely. There were also other errors in the early editions of the Book of Mormon such as changing the name of
King Benjamin
to
King Mosiah
or changing that
Mary was the ‘mother of God’
to
‘mother of the son of God’
Those are BIG differences.
Through the years there have been 3,913 changes to the first edition of Book of Mormon. This is the book Joseph called ‘the most correct book on earth’.
Really, the most correct book.
Then why did they make almost 4,000 changes?
Think about that.
