A Response to LDS Discussions’ Critique of the “Now You Know” Gold Plates Video

Examining the physical evidence, metallurgy, ancient parallels, and witness testimony behind the gold plates narrative

Introduction

On June 18, 2020, the website LDS Discussions published a critique of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ “Now You Know” video about the gold plates, originally released on April 13, 2020. The critique raises several challenges regarding the physical plausibility of the plates, the reliability of the eleven witnesses, the nature of ancient metal records, and the consistency of the translation narrative. Each of these deserves a careful, evidence-based response.

This article addresses each major claim in turn, drawing on metallurgical analysis, archaeology, historical documentation of Joseph Smith’s contemporaries, and the scholarly literature on the Book of Mormon witnesses. The evidence, when examined rigorously, strongly supports the coherence and plausibility of the gold plates account.

Claim 1: The Plates Were Too Heavy to Carry at Speed

LDS Discussions argues that if the gold plates weighed 40–60 pounds, it is physically implausible that Joseph Smith could have run from attackers while carrying them. The site quotes an 1839 account of Joseph fighting off three separate assailants while running home from the Hill Cumorah.

This objection rests on two errors: a mischaracterization of the plates’ likely composition, and an underestimation of Joseph Smith’s documented physical capacity.

The Tumbaga Solution: Metallurgy Resolves the Weight Problem

The Church’s “Now You Know” video acknowledges that the plates “likely weighed somewhere between 40 and 60 lbs”—a figure derived from multiple witness accounts. LDS Discussions treats this figure as damning, implying the plates must have been solid gold and thus would have weighed over 200 pounds, making the witness estimates internally inconsistent.

However, the assumption of solid gold is unfounded. Metallurgist Reed H. Putnam first proposed in 1966 that the plates were composed of tumbaga, a gold-copper alloy ubiquitous in ancient Mesoamerica. Geologist and engineer Jerry Grover subsequently modeled the composition more precisely, calculating that a tumbaga alloy consistent with ancient Mesoamerican metallurgy would produce plates weighing approximately 53–58 pounds for the dimensions described—exactly within the range witnesses reported.

William Smith, Witness

“I judged them to have weighed about sixty pounds… they were a mixture of gold and copper.”

William Smith’s testimony is particularly significant: he specifically stated the plates were “a mixture of gold and copper”—a description that matches tumbaga precisely. Tumbaga also has practical metallurgical advantages: it is harder than pure gold (making it more suitable for engraving) and can be surface-treated with a weak acid (such as citric acid from fruit juice) through a process called depletion gilding, dissolving surface copper and leaving a shiny layer of nearly pure gold on the exterior. This explains why witnesses consistently described the plates as having “the appearance of gold” rather than calling them solid gold outright.

The critic’s 200-pound objection therefore dissolves entirely. The witness estimates are internally consistent with a gold-copper alloy, and such alloys were in common use in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica.

Joseph Smith’s Documented Physical Capability

Even granting a weight in the range of 40–60 pounds, the objection that Joseph Smith could not have carried the plates at speed misunderstands his documented physical condition. Contemporary accounts consistently describe him as an exceptional physical specimen.

Contemporary Descriptions of Joseph Smith

Saint Louis Gazette, 1844 — “General Smith is in stature and proportion a very large man” with “chest and shoulders broad and muscular.”

History of the Church, 1843 — Smith pulled up “the strongest man in Ramus” with one hand while two others failed to pull him from the ground.

Newell Knight — “I never knew any one to gain advantage over him” in physical contests.

Wrestling record — Smith defeated the regional wrestling champion John Brassfield and later threw an imprisoned county champion into a pool of water.

Joseph Smith was over six feet tall, weighed approximately 200 pounds, and was by all accounts among the strongest men in his region. He was also 21 years old at the time of the plates’ retrieval in 1827—a young man at his physical peak. Modern military and athletic research confirms that trained individuals routinely carry loads of 50–80 pounds at sustained speed. The U.S. Army standard for combat load carriage regularly exceeds 60 pounds.

Furthermore, a careful reading of the account shows that Joseph was not engaged in sustained running while simultaneously fighting multiple opponents. Lucy Mack Smith’s account describes three sequential encounters spaced along his route home, not a continuous multi-person pursuit. In each encounter, Joseph struck a single attacker and continued running—behavior entirely consistent with a powerful young man carrying a 50-pound load over a short distance.

Actor Paul Wuthrich, in demonstrations produced by scholar Daniel C. Peterson, successfully ran repeatedly while carrying replica plates of 30–45 pounds, confirming the physical feasibility of the account even for an average person. For someone of Joseph Smith’s documented strength, the scenario presents no logical difficulty whatsoever.

Claim 2: Ancient Metal Plates Never Contained Extended Records

LDS Discussions contends that ancient metal records such as the Pyrgi Tablets contain only a few sentences, making an entire book written on metal plates implausible. The critique states: “Any idea that there are long form records on ancient metal plates is simply non-existent.”

This claim is demonstrably false. The archaeological and historical record contains numerous examples of substantial records inscribed on metal plates, including multi-plate collections spanning thousands of lines. The Pyrgi Tablets are among the shorter examples, not representative of the practice as a whole.

A Global Survey of Ancient Metal Records

Representative Examples of Ancient Metal Plate Records

Byblos Syllabic Inscriptions, 18th century BC (Lebanon) — Copper plates inscribed in a syllabary “clearly inspired by Egyptian hieroglyphics,” among the earliest known writing on metal.

Pyrgi Gold Tablets, ~500 BC (Italy) — Three gold plates with bilingual Phoenician and Etruscan religious text. Cited by critics as evidence against extended records, yet these are among the shorter examples of the practice.

Persian Gold & Silver Tablets, 515 BC — Deposited in the foundation of Darius the Great’s palace at Persepolis, containing royal inscriptions on gold and silver sheets.

I Maccabees 8:22 (Bronze Tablets) — The Hebrew scriptures record that a peace treaty between the Romans and the Maccabees was engraved on brass plates and kept in Jerusalem.

Taxila Gold Leaf, 1st century AD (Pakistan) — Fourteen lines of 100–132 characters each of Buddhist scripture, discovered near Taxila.

King Kaniska’s Copper Sheets, 100 AD (India) — Sacred scriptures engraved on copper sheets, enclosed in a stone box within a stupa.

Buddhist Canon on Gold Plates, 88 BC (Ceylon/Sri Lanka) — Ancient records indicate the entire Pali Canon was inscribed on sheets of gold.

Gupta Copper Plate Hoard, AD 956–1043 (Bagh, India) — 27 copper plates spanning 87 years and five rulers, containing land grants with detailed hereditary succession records.

Largest Known Copper Plate Hoard, 1024 AD (India) — 55 copper plates weighing 216 pounds containing over 2,500 lines of administrative text.

Peruvian Gold Sheets, Museum of Lima — Approximately 8×7 inch gold sheets, thin as paper, stacked nearly one inch thick—dimensions strikingly similar to the Book of Mormon plates.

Mixtecan Gold Plates (Mexico) — Thin gold sheets bearing ancient hieroglyphics, documented by R. M. Saville in The Goldsmith’s Art in Ancient Mexico.

Greek Bronze Treaty Tablets — Treaties between Greek city-states engraved on bronze plates and affixed to temple walls.

Indian Gold Leaf Book — 24 thick gold leaves bound together with copper wire—a direct structural parallel to the ring-bound Book of Mormon plates.

The evidence base is overwhelming. Extended records on metal plates are attested across the Near East, Persia, India, Sri Lanka, China, Mesoamerica, and South America. The practice of binding multiple plates together with rings or wire—exactly as described for the gold plates—is documented in Indian Buddhist manuscripts. The copper plate hoard from Bagh alone spans nearly a century and involves multiple rulers, demonstrating that multi-generational record-keeping on metal was a known and practiced form in the ancient world.

Historian Walter Burkert’s research further documents that “bronze deltoi”—plates from the Phoenician root dlt—transmitted writing practices from Phoenicians to Greeks in the 7th–6th centuries BC, precisely the period when the Book of Mormon places the Lehite colony departing from Jerusalem with brass plates of scripture.

The Pyrgi Tablets, far from disproving the Book of Mormon, are simply one instance of a widespread ancient practice. The critic commits the fallacy of unrepresentative sampling: citing the shortest examples while ignoring the substantial ones.

The Compactness of Reformed Egyptian

The Book of Mormon itself explains the choice of language: Mormon records that he wrote in “reformed Egyptian” because it was more compact than Hebrew, allowing more information to be inscribed in less space.

Hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were in common use during the 7th century BC and are well-attested as logographic and semi-logographic systems in which a single character can encode a complete word or morpheme. Scripture Central scholarship has demonstrated that a reformed logographic system could plausibly encode the Book of Mormon text at approximately 14 words per character—a reasonable ratio given known logographic density in ancient scripts. This reflects how Egyptian and Mayan scripts actually functioned. The objection that an entire book could not fit on metal plates misunderstands how information-dense ancient logographic writing systems were.

Claim 3: The Plates Were Not Used in Translation, Making Them Irrelevant

LDS Discussions makes much of the apparent contradiction between the Church’s April 2020 gold plates video and its June 2019 seer stone video, arguing that the Church “contradicted itself” by first admitting to stone-in-hat translation and then releasing a video about the plates.

This argument conflates two distinct questions: how the translation was performed and why the plates existed at all. The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay on the translation process, published years before either video, explicitly acknowledges that Joseph used a seer stone during portions of the translation. The 2019 seer stone video was consistent with that disclosure. The 2020 gold plates video is about the physical reality and witness testimony of the plates themselves, not the translation mechanism.

The critic frames this as an absurdity: “Why would the gold plates be preserved across generations just so Joseph Smith could translate with a rock?” But this objection applies the wrong standard. The plates served multiple purposes simultaneously:

The Plates Served Multiple Evidential Functions

Physical witness — Multiple individuals handled, hefted, and examined the plates independently, providing a corporeal anchor for the divine message.

Content source — The content being translated was derived from the plates, whether accessed directly or through a revelatory instrument attuned to the plates’ content.

Historical preservation — Moroni preserved the record so it could serve as a physical artifact testifying to the existence of the ancient civilization, regardless of the translation method employed.

Divine witness — The mode of translation itself—through a prepared instrument rather than unaided intellect—testified that the translation was of divine rather than human origin.

The argument that translation by seer stone renders the plates meaningless reflects a modern, mechanistic assumption that a physical object can serve only one function. In ancient Near Eastern thought, sacred physical objects and divine revelation coexisted without contradiction. The Urim and Thummim were physical objects used for divine communication in Israelite practice; no one argues that the existence of those instruments made the underlying scriptures irrelevant. The plates and the seer stone served complementary, not contradictory, roles.

Claim 4: The Witness Testimonies Are Unreliable

LDS Discussions directs readers to Dan Vogel’s YouTube series for what it calls detailed sourcing on “problems with the reliability of the witness statements.” The implication is that the witnesses’ testimony is undermined by later contradictions or recantations.

The historical record, carefully examined, does not support this conclusion. No witness to the gold plates—not one of the eleven—ever formally recanted their testimony. This is one of the most remarkable evidentiary facts in the entire history of the Restoration, and it deserves careful consideration.

The Eleven Witnesses: Who They Were and What They Said

The eleven men who formally witnessed the plates were: Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris (the Three Witnesses, who reported an angelic visitation); and Christian Whitmer, Jacob Whitmer, John Whitmer, Peter Whitmer Jr., Hiram Page, Joseph Smith Sr., Hyrum Smith, and Samuel H. Smith (the Eight Witnesses, who reported directly handling the plates without a vision).

David Whitmer, 1881

“I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof… It was no delusion! What is written is written.”

Hyrum Smith, 1839

“I felt a determination to die, rather than deny the things which my eyes had seen, which my hands had handled.”

John Whitmer, 1876

“I have never heard that any one of the three or eight witnesses ever denied the testimony that they have borne.”

Martin Harris, 1870

“No man ever heard me in any way deny the reality of the vision or the administration of the angel that showed me the plates.”

The Witnesses Separated from Joseph Smith—and Still Testified

The most powerful aspect of the witness testimony is that several witnesses became deeply estranged from Joseph Smith and the Church, yet none used that estrangement to deny what they had seen. Oliver Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 following a bitter public dispute with Joseph Smith. David Whitmer left the Church in 1838 and never returned. Martin Harris was excommunicated and later associated with multiple other religious movements. Jacob Whitmer, John Whitmer, and Hiram Page all became disaffected.

These men had every human motive to distance themselves from Joseph Smith. They faced public ridicule, social ostracism, and in some cases violent persecution for their association with Mormonism. If their testimony had been fabricated, coerced, or the product of shared delusion, the rational response would have been to clarify or recant once the relationship with Joseph Smith soured. None of them did.

Even William McLellin, a disaffected member who became one of Joseph Smith’s sharpest critics, personally interviewed the witnesses in 1831 and later wrote—decades after leaving the Church and being aware of stories he believed to be false—“I believe them yet” regarding the witnesses’ plate testimonies.

Secular historian Richard L. Bushman has noted: “Secular historians have never come to grips with the fact that none of the eleven who saw the plates ever recanted.” This is not a casual observation from a believer; it is a historiographical problem for any explanation of the Book of Mormon that does not include the plates being real.

The Martin Harris “Vision or Imagination” Claim

Critics, including Dan Vogel, rely heavily on a claim by Stephen Burnett that Martin Harris stated he “never saw the plates with his natural eyes only in vision or imagination.” This is the primary source used to argue that the witnesses experienced only subjective visions rather than physical encounters.

However, this is a single hearsay account from a disaffected member, recorded in a private letter. Harris himself directly and repeatedly contradicted this characterization. When informed of how Burnett had described his statement, Harris “arose and said he was sorry for any man who rejected the Book of Mormon, for he knew it was true.” He subsequently wrote that no man ever heard him deny the angel’s administration. Scholar Steven C. Harper identifies a methodological flaw in this approach: critics privilege hearsay accounts from disaffected members over the direct, repeated, first-person statements of the witnesses themselves.

Hiram Page, one of the Eight Witnesses, wrote in 1847 that it would be unjust for him to “say that black is white,” explicitly stating that his 1830 testimony remained as true in 1847 as when he gave it. Notably, Page had been disaffected from the Church for nearly a decade when he wrote this.

The Eight Witnesses are especially significant for the physical-reality question. Unlike the Three Witnesses, they did not receive an angelic visitation—they handled the plates in ordinary daylight, examining the engravings with their own hands. John Whitmer stated in 1836: “I have most assuredly seen the plates from whence the Book of Mormon is translated, and I have handled these plates.” This is not the language of vision or imagination; it is the direct language of physical contact.

Claim 5: The “Caractors” Document Shows the Script Was Not Ancient

LDS Discussions argues that the surviving “Caractors” document—a small paper with characters Joseph Smith copied from the plates—looks like “deformed English” rather than an authentic ancient script, and that the Church deliberately avoids showing this document in its videos.

Several points are relevant here. First, the characters on the Caractors document have been subject to serious scholarly analysis. The symbols bear structural resemblance to known demotic and hieratic Egyptian characters, including the type of shorthand modifications a scribe would introduce over centuries of isolated use—precisely what “reformed” Egyptian would suggest. The superficial resemblance to English letters that critics note is not surprising, since both English letterforms and Egyptian characters derive ultimately from Semitic writing systems. Superficial visual similarity is not evidence of forgery.

Second, the claim that these look like “crude English modifications” was notably evaluated by Columbia University professor Charles Anthon in 1828, to whom Martin Harris brought a copy. Anthon’s own account describes the characters as “Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac, and Arabic”—not as modified English. Critics dispute aspects of this account, but Anthon’s description is not that of someone looking at obvious English letters with lines through them.

Third, the Book of Mormon explicitly acknowledges that its script was an evolved and modified form of Egyptian, not pure hieroglyphics. Mormon states that the language had changed over time and that “none other people knoweth our language.” The script would therefore be expected to look unlike any known ancient writing system in its pure form. Applying the standard “it doesn’t look like classical Egyptian, therefore it is fake” is precisely backwards: a genuine reformed script centuries removed from its source would look modified.

The Broader Pattern of the Critique

LDS Discussions acknowledges that “every time an apologist explains away a problem, their reasoning opens up ten more issues.” This rhetorical frame—where every answer is treated as generating new problems—is a methodological posture rather than a historical argument. Applied consistently, it would render any historical claim unfalsifiable in the negative direction: no evidence for the plates could ever be sufficient, because any supporting evidence will be reframed as generating new objections.

The scholarly standard for evaluating historical claims is not whether every detail fits perfectly into a modern skeptic’s prior framework, but whether the totality of the evidence is better explained by one account than by its alternatives. When that standard is applied to the gold plates:

The Evidence in Summary

Weight — Witness reports of 40–60 lbs are precisely consistent with a tumbaga alloy composition, which was in widespread pre-Columbian use and was specifically identified as a “mixture of gold and copper” by witness William Smith.

Portability — Joseph Smith’s documented physical strength, combined with the sequential rather than simultaneous nature of his encounters with attackers, makes the flight from Cumorah fully plausible.

Ancient parallels — Extended records on metal plates—including multi-plate collections bound with rings—are archaeologically attested across the Near East, India, Sri Lanka, and the Americas. The Pyrgi Tablets are the anomaly in their brevity, not the norm.

Witnesses — Eleven men, multiple of whom became deeply estranged from Joseph Smith and the Church, never recanted their physical testimony. The alternative hypothesis—fraud or shared delusion—cannot account for the persistence of witness testimony across decades of adversity and separation.

Translation method — The use of a seer stone does not render the plates superfluous; it is consistent with the ancient Near Eastern pattern of sacred physical objects used in conjunction with divine instruments.

None of these points, individually, constitutes absolute proof. Historical inquiry rarely produces that. But taken together, they constitute a coherent, internally consistent, and archaeologically grounded account. The alternative proposed by LDS Discussions—that Joseph Smith constructed an elaborate prop, enlisted the cooperation or self-deception of eleven witnesses, invented a metallurgically plausible alloy description without knowing metallurgy, produced a text with authentic ancient Near Eastern literary forms, and did all of this at age 23 without formal education—requires far more credulity than the account it seeks to replace.

Conclusion

The LDS Discussions critique of the “Now You Know” gold plates video raises genuine questions that deserve honest engagement. The weight of the plates, the nature of ancient metal records, the reliability of the witnesses, and the relationship between the plates and the translation process are all legitimate areas of inquiry.

But when examined with the full weight of the available evidence—metallurgical analysis, global archaeology, documented history of Joseph Smith’s physical capabilities, and the first-person statements of the witnesses themselves—the critique does not hold up. The claim that ancient extended records on metal plates were non-existent is falsified by dozens of archaeological examples. The claim that 60 pounds was impossible to carry is falsified by metallurgical modeling and contemporary witness accounts. The claim that the witnesses were unreliable is falsified by the absence of any recantation despite decades of adversarial separation from Joseph Smith.

The gold plates narrative, far from being implausible, is supported by a convergence of independent lines of evidence that the LDS Discussions critique does not address with adequate rigor. The Church’s “Now You Know” video is brief and accessible; it was not designed as a scholarly treatise. But the underlying scholarship—Putnam, Grover, Bushman, Harper, Givens, Peterson, Burkert—is substantive, peer-engaged, and available for any reader who wishes to go deeper.

The eleven witnesses staked their reputations, their social standing, and in some cases their safety on what they saw and handled. Not one ever said it did not happen. That fact alone deserves serious reflection.

Sources and Further Reading

Key Scholarly and Apologetic Resources

FAIR Latter-day Saints — “Weight and Size of the Gold Plates”; “Examples of Ancient Writing on Metal Plates”; “Metal Plates in Ancient Israel” — fairlatterdaysaints.org

Scripture Central — “Composition of the Plates”; “Metal Plates in the Ancient World”; “Compact Egyptian Script” — scripturecentral.org

Steven C. Harper — “The Eleven Witnesses” in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon, BYU Religious Studies Center — rsc.byu.edu

Richard L. Bushman — Rough Stone Rolling: A Cultural Biography of Mormonism’s Founder, Knopf, 2005.

Reed H. Putnam — “Were the Plates of Mormon of Tumbaga?” Improvement Era, 1966.

Jerry Grover — Ziff, Magic Goggles, and Golden Plates (geological/metallurgical analysis of the plates), 2015.

BYU RSC — Joseph Smith’s Athletic Nature — rsc.byu.edu

Witnesses of the Book of Mormon (official documentary) — churchofjesuschrist.org