“I Cannot Read a Sealed Book”: Isaiah 29, Martin Harris, and the Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon

A scholarly examination of the Isaiah 29 fulfillment narrative, the manuscript record, and the deep structural evidence that critics consistently overlook.

Introduction: The Anatomy of the Critique

The ldsdiscussions.com article “I Cannot Read a Sealed Book” raises five objections to the LDS interpretation of Isaiah 29 and the Martin Harris–Charles Anthon episode: (1) the 1832 account omits the “sealed book” phrase; (2) the 1838 account was written after Harris’s excommunication, with others composing it in his voice; (3) the “sealed book” language was added to the manuscript in different ink; (4) non-LDS scholars say Isaiah’s “sealed book” is metaphorical, not prophetic; and (5) this follows a pattern of Joseph Smith “retrofitting” scripture to himself. These are serious claims that deserve a serious answer. When examined against the full evidentiary record, every one of them either misrepresents the evidence or collapses under careful scrutiny.

I. The Two Accounts: What the 1832 History Actually Shows

Critics point to Joseph Smith’s 1832 history as evidence that the “sealed book” detail was invented later. The argument runs: if the Anthon exchange was so important, why did the 1832 account omit it? But this argument proves too much. The 1832 account is not an attempt at comprehensive history—it is a brief, personal spiritual narrative running just a few paragraphs over the entire founding of the Church. It omits dozens of events later considered foundational, including virtually all the details of Moroni’s visits, the Angel’s specific instructions, and the Urim and Thummim. Absence from a summary sketch is not evidence of invention.

More critically, the 1832 account does explicitly connect Harris’s visit to Isaiah 29. Joseph Smith wrote that Harris took the characters “to the learned, saying, ‘Read this, I pray thee,’” and that “thus the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled which is written in the 29 chapter.” The precise language of Isaiah 29:11—“Read this, I pray thee”—is already present in the 1832 account. The Isaiah 29 connection is not a late invention; it was already Joseph Smith’s explicit framework in 1832. What the 1832 account omits is only the dramatic detail of Anthon’s specific reply—not the prophetic category itself.

“He took his journey to the Eastern Cities and to the learned, saying, ‘Read this, I pray thee.’ And the learned said, ‘I cannot, but if he would bring the plates they would read it.’… And I said ‘I cannot, for I am not learned.’… Thus the prophecy of Isaiah was fulfilled which is written in the 29 chapter.”
— Joseph Smith, 1832 History, emphasis added

This single passage demolishes the retrofitting hypothesis. Isaiah 29 was Joseph Smith’s interpretive lens from the beginning. The 1832 text already cites Isaiah 29:11’s language (“Read this, I pray thee”) and Isaiah 29:12 (“I cannot, for I am not learned”). The 1838 account simply filled in further detail—entirely consistent with how oral traditions and historical memory work.

II. The Ink-Change Argument: What the Joseph Smith Papers Actually Show

The claim that the “sealed book” phrase was “added later in different ink” is presented by ldsdiscussions.com as dispositive evidence of fabrication. This argument requires more careful handling than critics have given it.

First, manuscript correction with different ink is a normal feature of historical documents and tells us nothing by itself about the timing or authenticity of the content added. Scribes routinely reviewed, added, and corrected dictated histories as accounts were reviewed for accuracy. The Joseph Smith Papers Project—an exhaustive, professionally edited scholarly publication that is transparent about every manuscript alteration—documents hundreds of such corrections across all Joseph Smith documents. Corrections do not equal fabrications. The question is whether the added detail is consistent with the surrounding record. And it is: the 1832 account already confirms that a scholar said he could not read the record, and specifically cited Isaiah 29 for that event.

Second, the change in ink does not establish when the addition was made. It could have been days after the original dictation, when a scribe reviewed the manuscript with the principals present. Ink-change analysis alone cannot determine whether a correction was made in 1838, 1839, or very shortly after the original session. Critics assert it was late enough to constitute deception; the manuscript itself does not establish this.

Third, and most fundamentally: even if one grants that this particular phrase was added for emphasis, the underlying event—that Harris visited scholars who could not authenticate the characters and declined to read a sealed portion of the record—is attested from multiple independent sources predating the 1838 history.

III. The Corroborating Witness Record

The ldsdiscussions.com article frames the Anthon visit as essentially a two-party transaction between Harris and Anthon, then dismisses it due to conflicting accounts. This framing obscures the broader evidentiary record.

The Three Scholars

Harris did not merely visit Anthon. He consulted three independent scholars in sequence, each with relevant expertise: (1) Luther Bradish, a former U.S. diplomatic agent who had lived in Egypt and possessed personal knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics, who directed Harris to the relevant experts in New York; (2) Charles Anthon, Columbia College’s preeminent classicist; and (3) Samuel L. Mitchill, widely regarded as America’s foremost naturalist and a scholar of ancient languages and American Indian origins. Mitchill compared the characters with Champollion’s hieroglyphic discoveries and identified them as “the language of a people formerly in existence in the East, but now no more”—a judgment entirely consistent with his own prior scholarly work on extinct pre-Columbian cultures.

This multi-scholar corroboration is documented in James Gordon Bennett’s 1831 journal—an independent, non-Mormon source predating the contested 1838 history by seven years. Bennett recorded in detail Harris’s visit to the Columbia College professor (Anthon) and his subsequent examination by Mitchill, who provided the most substantive scholarly engagement. Mitchill’s willingness to engage seriously with the characters was consistent with his own scholarly framework. His endorsement came from a man with no incentive to validate a young farm laborer from Palmyra.

Anthon’s Own Contradictions Work Against His Denial

The ldsdiscussions.com article notes that Anthon gave two contradictory accounts and acknowledges discrepancies between them. This concession is more damaging to the critical case than critics acknowledge. In his first denial letter, Anthon denies having given Harris any written document. In his second account, he admits giving a written statement but claims it was a warning against investment. These self-contradictions are glaring: a man whose account is truthful does not contradict himself on whether he gave someone a written document. The contradictions are most easily explained by a man who initially denied everything and then, when pressed, was forced to concede the written document existed while spinning its purpose.

An honest evaluation of competing self-interests is essential here. Anthon had powerful professional and social reasons to distance himself from any association with a controversial religious movement that had become a national scandal by 1833 when he wrote his denials. Harris, by contrast, had already sacrificed his marriage, $3,000 in farm-era money, and his social standing based on his convictions. His testimony carries the weight that comes from someone who paid dearly and personally for it.

IV. The “Sealed Book” Dialogue: Does It Make Narrative Sense?

The ldsdiscussions.com article raises an objection that may seem clever but actually backfires on close reading: Why would Anthon focus on the sealed portion when an unsealed portion was ostensibly available for examination? The article implies this is logically incoherent.

The context answers the objection directly. When Harris informed Anthon that the source of the characters was an angel-delivered set of metal plates, part of which was sealed by divine command and could not be shown to anyone, Anthon’s demand was to see the actual plates. Harris’s response was that they could not be shown to him. Anthon’s reply—“I cannot read a sealed book”—was not a technical linguistic statement about the sealed portion alone; it was a dismissive response to the entire project: if I cannot examine the actual source material because it is divinely sealed from my access, then I cannot authenticate anything for you. This is entirely coherent given the dynamics of the encounter, and is precisely the kind of terse scholarly dismissal one would expect from a Columbia professor confronted with claims about angelic messengers.

V. The Scholarly Objection to Isaiah 29: A Category Error

The most substantive objection in the ldsdiscussions.com article is the scholarly one: non-LDS commentators say Isaiah 29’s “sealed book” is a metaphor for spiritual blindness, not a prophecy of a literal future record. Multiple commentators are cited (Matthew Henry, Cambridge Bible, Jamieson-Fausset-Brown, Geneva Study Bible), and even BYU professor Charles Harrell is quoted to the effect that “Isaiah isn’t talking about a literal book.”

This objection commits a fundamental methodological error: it assumes that LDS claims for the fulfillment of Isaiah 29 rest on the original historical meaning of the Hebrew text in Isaiah’s seventh-century BC context. They do not—and the Book of Mormon itself never makes this claim.

What LDS Scripture Actually Claims

The relevant LDS prophetic claim does not originate with Isaiah—it originates with Nephi, writing in 2 Nephi 27 approximately 550 BC. What we have in 2 Nephi 27 is not Isaiah 29 with LDS commentary appended; it is Nephi’s own independent prophecy that draws on Isaiah’s language and imagery through a practice scholars have termed pesher or prophetic “likening”—to frame his own revelation about the latter-day coming forth of his record.

This distinction is supported by LDS scholars at Scripture Central, the Religious Studies Center, and the Neal A. Maxwell Institute. They have documented that Nephi never directly quotes Isaiah 29 the way he quotes Isaiah 48–49; instead, he weaves Isaiah’s vocabulary into his own prophetic composition. When Nephi states in 2 Nephi 27:9–14 that a book “shall be delivered unto a man” who will show it to a learned man who replies “I cannot,” followed by three witnesses testifying of the book and an “unlearned” man receiving the book from the Lord—this is Nephi’s own revelation, not a quotation of Isaiah.

“And the book shall be sealed by the power of God, and the revelation which was sealed shall be kept in the book until the own due time of the Lord, that they may come forth; for behold, they reveal all things from the foundation of the world unto the end thereof. And the day cometh that the words of the book which were sealed shall be read upon the house tops; and they shall be read by the power of Christ.”
— 2 Nephi 27:10–11

Isaiah 29’s original context—the siege of Jerusalem, spiritual blindness, the Lord’s judgment on Ariel—is indeed what non-LDS scholars are analyzing. They are right to analyze it that way for biblical exegesis. But that exegesis is entirely irrelevant to the LDS claim, which is that Nephi, independently inspired, prophesied these events seven centuries later using Isaiah’s symbolic framework as his vehicle. The critics’ scholarly citations prove what LDS scholars already acknowledge: Isaiah’s metaphor was metaphorical. The debate was never about Isaiah. It was about Nephi.

VI. The Predictive Specificity of 2 Nephi 27: The Retrofitting Hypothesis Fails

If the Anthon narrative were a later fabrication designed to fulfill prophecy, we would expect the match between Nephi’s text and the fulfillment events to be loose and general. Instead, the specificity is extraordinary across five independent and verifiable categories.

1. A Physically Sealed Portion

2 Nephi 27:7–10 specifies that the book will have a sealed and an unsealed portion, with the sealed portion withheld. Joseph Smith and all eyewitnesses described the physical gold plates as having a sealed portion bound with metal bands. This specific detail—a two-part, partially sealed physical document—has a precise ancient parallel: the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern “doubled, sealed, and witnessed document” tradition documented in legal records from at least 2900 BC, including Jeremiah 32:11–14. The Book of Mormon’s pattern of a sealed inner document and an open outer copy, certified by formal witnesses, precisely matches this ancient legal tradition unknown to 19th-century Americans.

2. A Learned Man Who Says “I Cannot”

2 Nephi 27:15–17 predicts that a learned man, when presented with the book’s words, will say he cannot read it. This was fulfilled precisely by Anthon, corroborated as early as 1831 by Bennett’s independent newspaper account. Even the ldsdiscussions.com article acknowledges that a scholar told Harris he “could not decipher” the characters.

3. An Unlearned Man as Translator

2 Nephi 27:19 specifies that the book will ultimately go to one who “is not learned,” and the Lord will reveal the words directly. Joseph Smith, who had approximately three years of frontier schooling, fits this description by every historical measure. His inability to have produced the Book of Mormon through academic means is itself a major argument for its divine origin—a separate but reinforcing line of evidence.

4. Three Formal Witnesses

2 Nephi 27:12 specifies: “three witnesses shall behold it, by the power of God.” The Book of Mormon was published in 1830 with the formal testimony of exactly three witnesses—Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris—plus eight additional witnesses. This precise detail (three, not two, not four) was committed to Nephi’s prophecy centuries before the witnesses experienced their vision and is not derivable from Isaiah 29, which mentions no witnesses at all. The specificity is Nephi’s own, and it was fulfilled exactly.

5. Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 Testimony Predates the 1838 History

The argument that Isaiah 29 was only retroactively connected to the Anthon visit in the disputed 1838 history fails against a documented earlier source. Oliver Cowdery, writing publicly in the Messenger and Advocate in 1834—four years before the contested history—stated that the angel Moroni cited Isaiah 29:14 (“marvelous work and wonder”) to Joseph Smith in 1823, before any translation occurred, and that the prophecy “needed to be fulfilled” before the work could proceed. The Isaiah 29 framework therefore cannot be a post-hoc 1838 invention—it was being invoked publicly in 1834 by an independent firsthand witness describing events from 1823.

VII. Moroni’s 1823 Citation: The Connection Predates Everything

The retrofitting hypothesis requires that Joseph Smith invented the Isaiah 29 connection in 1838 to bolster the Anthon story. To sustain this hypothesis, one must: (a) ignore Oliver Cowdery’s 1834 published account connecting Isaiah 29 to the Restoration from its very beginning in 1823; (b) ignore that the 1832 history itself cites Isaiah 29 explicitly; (c) explain how Joseph Smith composed 2 Nephi 27 in 1829–30 with five specific predictions that precisely match events already occurring and yet to occur; and (d) explain why the physical plates—described consistently by eleven eyewitnesses—had a sealed portion matching Nephi’s description, before the question of its prophetic significance became contested.

The only parsimonious explanation for this convergence of independently attested details is that the prophetic framework came first, and the historical events fulfilled it. The retrofitting hypothesis demands too many simultaneous fabrications across too many independent sources and time points to be credible as historical explanation.

VIII. The Harrell Quotation in Context: A Concession That Supports the LDS Position

The ldsdiscussions.com article quotes BYU professor Charles Harrell to the effect that “Isaiah isn’t talking about a literal book, much less one that would come forth in the future.” This is an honest statement—and it actually supports the LDS apologist’s position. What Harrell’s analysis establishes is precisely what LDS scholars at Scripture Central and the Maxwell Institute argue: Isaiah’s original passage is metaphorical, and Nephi was not quoting Isaiah—Nephi was writing his own prophecy, using Isaiah’s vocabulary to express a new and literal revelation. The two claims are fully compatible. The critical argument depends on collapsing Nephi’s independent prophecy into Isaiah’s poem, then using scholarly consensus about Isaiah to disprove a Nephite claim. This is a logical non-sequitur that demonstrates unfamiliarity with the LDS scholarly framework being refuted.

IX. The Pattern Argument Examined

The ldsdiscussions.com article concludes by invoking “a pattern” of Joseph Smith inserting himself into scripture—citing Genesis 50 in the JST, 2 Nephi 3, and references to seer stones and treasure digging in the Book of Mormon. This argument is unfalsifiable as presented: any prophetic self-awareness becomes evidence of fabrication, and any fulfillment of prior prophecy becomes evidence of retrofitting. Under this standard no historical fulfillment of any prophecy could ever be acknowledged as genuine, because the standard rules out divine involvement by methodological assumption rather than by evidence.

Moreover, the cited examples actually reinforce rather than undermine the LDS case. The JST addition of a “Joseph” prophecy in Genesis 50 is internally consistent with 2 Nephi 3, which was published in 1830—years before the JST revision of Genesis. If Joseph Smith was fabricating self-references, he was doing so consistently across texts produced years apart in ways that precisely corroborate each other. That is an extraordinary feat of sustained literary invention for someone critics simultaneously describe as theologically unsophisticated and historically opportunistic. The simplest explanation is that both texts reflect the same prophetic tradition.

X. Summary of the Evidence

Conclusion

The ldsdiscussions.com critique of the “I cannot read a sealed book” episode is a serious attempt to engage the historical and textual record, and it raises questions that believers should think carefully about. But on examination, it fails at every evidentiary stage. The Isaiah 29 framework was present in Joseph Smith’s earliest account. The event itself is corroborated by independent sources predating the contested 1838 history by years. The ink-change argument proves scribal editing, not fabrication, and cannot be precisely dated. The scholarly consensus about Isaiah’s original metaphorical intent is simply irrelevant to the Nephite prophetic claim in 2 Nephi 27. And the predictive specificity of 2 Nephi 27—five independent verifiable details, all corroborated before the apologetic need for them arose—cannot be explained by any coherent theory of fabrication.

The critics would have Joseph Smith simultaneously composing a document (2 Nephi 27) in 1829–30 that predicted five specific features of events he was currently experiencing, then independently fabricating the historical record in 1838 to match those predictions—while leaving the 1832 account, Bennett’s 1831 newspaper, Cowdery’s 1834 letters, and the unanimous testimony of eleven eyewitnesses to the physical plates as consistent corroboration of the framework. The simpler explanation, and the one that fits all the evidence without requiring systematic deception across a dozen independent sources, is that the events happened as recorded, and Nephi saw them.

Sources and Further Reading:

Richard E. Bennett, “Martin Harris’s 1828 Visit to Luther Bradish, Charles Anthon, and Samuel Mitchill,” BYU Religious Studies Center. rsc.byu.edu

Robert A. Cloward, “Isaiah 29 and the Book of Mormon.” scripturecentral.org

“Why Does Nephi Use Isaiah 29 as Part of His Own Prophecy?” Scripture Central. scripturecentral.org

“Book of Mormon Evidence: Doubled, Sealed, and Witnessed Documents,” Scripture Central. scripturecentral.org

“Martin Harris’s Consultations with Scholars,” Gospel Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. churchofjesuschrist.org

Joseph Spencer and Jenny Webb, Reading Nephi Reading Isaiah, Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, 2011.

Joseph Smith, 1832 History, Joseph Smith Papers. josephsmithpapers.org