karl61 wrote:http://emp.byui.edu/satterfieldb/Rel121 ... 20BofM.pdfThus, everything we have in the Book of Mormon, according to Mr. Whitmer, was translated by placing the chocolate stone in a hat into which Joseph would bury his head as to close out the light. While doing so he could see 'an oblong piece of parchment, on which the hieroglyphics would appear,' and below the ancient writing, the translation would would be given in English. Joseph would then read this to Oliver Cowdery, who in turn would write it. If he did so correctly, the characters and the interpretation would disappear and be replaced by other characters with their interpretation"."Such an explanation is, in our judgement, simply fiction created for the purpose of demeaning Joseph Smith to undermine the validity of the revelations he received after translating the Book of Mormon. We invite the read to consider the following"
They then go into discrediting Whitmer.
Your excerpts are from an article in a book published by Deseret. The book is titled:
Revelations of the Restoration: A Commentary on the Doctrine and Covenants and Other Modern Revelations.
The authors and their position held then:
--Joseph Fielding McConkie (Professor of Ancient Scripture, BYU)
and
--Craig J. Ostler (Assistant Professor of Church History and Doctrine, BYU)
The response to the rock story by the two professors quoted above captures a response that I think represents a very normal reaction by most people--using a rock like that is silly and unbelievable, and it does demean credibility.
So how did the church go from publishing articles like the above to releasing pictures of the rock, if its story could so easily be considered demeaning and unbelievable? Why risk that additional problem? Why not just leave images of the stone out of the mix?
My hypothesis on why they did this goes back to the discussion on the other thread regarding why the plates were necessary.
Quote after quote in the other thread about this article shows that church leaders see the plates, not as "essential to the translation," but as essential to establishing credibility. This same idea came up recently in Holland's wrong roads story; god sent them down the wrong road so that they could have concrete evidence, rather than just have them rely on revelation from the spirit.
So I could easily see church leaders rather naïvely thinking that the rock would qualify as physical "evidence," without thinking through what it would actually look like: a silly, non-provenanced, largely irrelevant, magical rock that further demeans the Book of Mormon translation story. (As if South Park didn't do a good enough job at that already.)
They couldn't produce the plates, so instead they produced the rock, hoping to supplement its validity by arguing that of course we've always known that the rock was used, not the plates.