If Joseph Smith’s explanation of translation kept “changing,” why do the earliest witnesses consistently describe the same revelatory process?
The CES Letter claims that explanations of the Book of Mormon translation have changed over time.
But what exactly changed?
And compared to what?
Where is the early source that claims Joseph Smith sat studying the plates like a scholar translating a language?
Did Joseph Smith ever actually say that?
Or is that assumption coming from somewhere else?
From where?
Primary classes?
Sunday School speculation?
Later artistic depictions?
What do the earliest witnesses actually describe?
When you read the earliest historical sources, what do they actually say about the translation?
Emma Smith said Joseph dictated the text without manuscripts.
Oliver Cowdery testified the book was translated by the gift and power of God.
David Whitmer described words appearing during the process of translation.
Where in those early testimonies do we find a careful scholarly translation process?
Where do we find Joseph studying characters like a linguist?
Where do we find witnesses describing Joseph reading directly from the plates?
Were the plates even visible?
Were the plates even visible during the translation?
Did Joseph not repeatedly say the plates were covered?
Did witnesses not say the plates were often not even in the room?
If that is true, then why assume the translation required reading directly from the plates in the first place?
Where did that assumption originate?
What was actually “hidden”?
Then we hear the criticism.
Joseph sometimes used a seer stone.
So the story must be changing.
But is that actually new information?
Or was that described by early witnesses all along?
Did Emma Smith not mention it?
Did David Whitmer not describe it?
Did Martin Harris not talk about it decades before modern critics discovered it?
So what exactly was hidden?
Why focus on the tool instead of the revelation?
Why does the CES Letter treat the tool as the important part of the story?
Why is the focus always on the stone?
Why not on the revelation?
If the translation occurred by the gift and power of God, does the instrument actually matter?
Does revelation depend on the object used to receive it?
Did biblical prophets not use rods, staffs, stones, dreams, visions, and other instruments through which God revealed information?
Why would a seer stone be treated as strange in a biblical worldview?
Did Joseph need physical tools forever?
Did Joseph Smith continue receiving revelation later without using seer stones at all?
Yes.
Did that cause tension with some early believers?
Yes.
David Whitmer later expressed concern about revelation without physical instruments.
Why would Whitmer struggle with that if the stone itself was the source of revelation?
Would that not suggest the stone was only a tool?
Why is the method the center of the debate?
Why is the translation method the center of the debate?
Why not the text itself?
How did Joseph Smith dictate a book over 500 pages long in a short period of time?
Without manuscripts.
Without revisions.
Without research libraries.
Without referencing the Bible during the dictation.
How did a complex narrative structure emerge in real time?
How did dozens of named characters appear across centuries of narrative?
How did sermons, wars, prophecies, and theological arguments appear in a continuous dictated text?
If the process was fraudulent, would the method really matter?
If the process was fraudulent, would the method really matter?
Would it matter if he looked at plates?
Would it matter if he looked at a stone?
Would it matter if he closed his eyes?
Would the real issue not still remain the same?
The existence of the text itself?
So the question critics raise becomes something very different.
Not why translation descriptions vary.
But why critics insist on imposing a rigid mechanical model onto a process that every witness described as revelation.
If the witnesses consistently said the Book of Mormon came through revelation by the gift and power of God, why assume the translation had to work like an ordinary linguistic translation in the first place?