Very interesting and productive ideas, PG. So, my response to some of this is that I am only using the term "hoax" as the outsider's term for what we are looking at here. Here the "hoax" is a winking message to insiders. It is a way of passing out a calling card to identify the "hoaxer" and his efforts with a certain tradition. It is difficult to tell how sincere or insincere this person is in their actions. So I tend to set that issue aside. In these situations, it is difficult to pigeonhole what we are looking at. Observers can't help but try to place what they are seeing in comfortable categories. We seek resolution.So, to come back to Joseph Smith. Suppose he made some fake plates in an effort to get people to believe in his Mormonism. If he and everyone else was thinking strictly in terms of reasoning from evidence to objective truth, then he was deliberately mounting a hoax, consciously running a con. What if instead he and everyone else involved was thinking differently, though?
There was a classic Simpsons episode in which Lisa gets a birthday song written for her personally by "Michael Jackson", for the case in which "Michael Jackson" is actually an overweight white guy who lives in a mental institution, though he speaks in a convincing imitation of Michael Jackson's voice (being voiced by Michael Jackson). At a decisive point "Michael Jackson" explains to Lisa that she can simply choose between two scenarios. In one of them she gets a song written for her by Michael Jackson, and in the other she's only interacting with a crazy person. Which scenario is better? Lisa decides to go along with believing in "Michael Jackson" for the duration of his song, after which he reverts to his deeper natural voice, reveals his real name, and leaves the institution, at which he was only staying voluntarily. He's not really delusional; he just really likes pretending to be Michael Jackson.
If you're a poor farmhand or struggling shopkeeper in rural New England in the 1830s, the scenario in which a prophet has received ancient plates from an angel is a heck of a lot more exciting than the one in which one of your fellow rural rubes has cooked up a crude hoax. Really investigating all these claims is going to be hard. Anybody here read hieroglyphics? And what would careful investigation bring you, anyway? Best case, it leads you to the same positive conclusion that you want to reach anyway, just after a lot more work. Worst case, it ruins the most excitement these parts have seen for generations.
So maybe it wasn't really a hoax after all. Maybe it was more like making a movie or an advertisement, inviting people to play along, and making it more fun and easy to get into the game. I wonder now how many early Mormons weren't exactly convinced that everything Smith said was true, but were simply convinced to play along in a cool game.
I understand that, and I understand the general demographic on MDB. It is easier for us to talk about hoaxes because it seems to satisfy the desire of many to identify clearly who Joseph Smith was in a deflated or negative way. Honestly, I don't think there is anything insignificant about hoaxing, and I don't think it is necessary to see it in a negative way. Hoaxing deliberately occupies a zone of ambiguity that gives people room to enter into a different narrative. Whether Joseph Smith had ancient gold plates or not, the tradition of legitimizing knowledge through finding a buried or lost book in the earth is very ancient, and arguably constitutes a kind of ritual scenario in its own right.
If we go back to the discovery of the Books of Numa in 181 BCE, we see a nice parallel to the plates in the ambiguity of deception versus real sacred object. The Books of Numa had the advantage of occurring at a time when it was much more difficult to identify a forgery. Noteworthy is the fact that Roman authorities destroyed the books through a sacrificial process, leaving the ambiguity intact and preserving interest in the books for thousands of years. The figure of Numa received indirect support from interest in his books. To get a sense of the kind of interest he generated one can read Plutarch's Life of Numa. The forged Books of Numa, as objects of incredible significance that could not be submitted to careful examination, continued to inspire questions about Numa and make him seem all the more intriguing.
The Book of Mormon exists in a similar zone of ambiguity. It invites some to invest in its spiritual power. It invites others to discredit it. The fact that it does both so well says something about the skill of the person who constructed the entire thing from the belief in its existence, to the efforts to recover it, and the translation of the plates. Some of Smith's most literal or maybe canny imitators have realized that finding an ancient record and translating it is at the heart of Mormon ritual and narrative practice. In the LDS Church, the lure of that process was preserved in the "sealed plates"--the promise that some future LDS leader would do exactly what Joseph Smith did with the part of the plates Smith did not translate. Some enterprising souls have taken it upon themselves to circumvent the Church and go straight after their own claim to have done so.