Joseph Smith as Translator: A Scholarly Response to LDS Discussions

LDS Discussions asks readers to evaluate Joseph Smith’s translations as they would “any other religious or spiritual leader.” We accept that challenge — and find that the evidence, properly examined, consistently favors authenticity over fabrication.

I. The Foundational Problem: What Does “Translation” Mean?

Every argument on the LDS Discussions overview page rests on a single unexamined premise: that when Joseph Smith used the word “translation,” he meant precisely what a twenty-first-century secular linguist means by it — a word-for-word, character-by-character rendering of one language into another. This premise is never argued; it is simply assumed. Once that assumption is dismantled, much of the critique collapses.

Stephen O. Smoot, writing in the Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship (2025), observes that Joseph Smith “used the word ‘translate’ differently than how it is usually used today.” Brant Gardner’s landmark volume Producing Ancient Scripture (University of Utah Press, 2020) — whose contributors include both believing and non-believing scholars — establishes that Joseph’s concept of translation encompassed “bringing the world of the divine into contact with the human domain.” Samuel Brown’s Joseph Smith’s Translation Vision documents how the Prophet situated his work within a broad 19th-century intellectual tradition of “pure language” recovery, in which divine revelation and linguistic engagement were not opposites but partners.

This is not an apologetic escape hatch invented after the fact. Joseph himself declared he translated “by the gift and power of God” — a description that explicitly invokes supernatural agency rather than academic linguistic methodology. Critic and defender alike must reckon with what Joseph actually claimed, not with what a modern secular critic wishes he had claimed.

“The way he used the word ‘translate’ is different than how it is usually used today. The method of translation was understood to be not so much secular or academic learning… but instead inspiration.”
— Stephen O. Smoot, From the Desk, interview with Kurt Manwaring (2025)

The LDS Discussions argument repeatedly demands that inspired translation produce results identical to academic translation. This is not a neutral methodological standard; it is a philosophical commitment to naturalism dressed as evidentialism. A critic who rules out divine revelation before examining the evidence has not applied a scholarly standard — he has applied an ideological one.

II. The Book of Mormon Characters (“Caractors”)

LDS Discussions claims the “Caractors” document proves Joseph invented a fake Egyptian script by modifying English letters. This argument contains several critical flaws.

The Charles Anthon Testimony Cuts Both Ways

The LDS Discussions account omits a crucial part of the Anthon story. Charles Anthon was one of the leading classical scholars in America at the time. Martin Harris reported that Anthon certified the characters as “true characters,” and that the translation was “correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian.” Anthon later wrote a dismissive letter contradicting this — but his contradiction involved self-serving revisionism, as he was a prominent scholar who had now been placed embarrassingly at the center of a religious story. The point is not that Anthon verified the Book of Mormon; the point is that LDS Discussions presents the Anthon visit as straightforwardly damaging when the primary sources are considerably more ambiguous.

The “Modified English” Claim Is Circular

LDS Discussions presents a rotated image and declares the characters look like English letters. This is precisely the kind of visual pattern-matching that scholars warn against. Semitic and Egyptian scripts have been shown to share visual overlaps with Greek and Latin characters for centuries — indeed, all Western alphabets derive from a common Semitic ancestor. The argument proves nothing except that a critic who begins with the conclusion “these are fake” can find confirmatory visual patterns in any script. Michael Hubbard MacKay’s analysis in Producing Ancient Scripture treats the Caractors document as a serious scholarly artifact deserving careful analysis — not as self-evident disproof.

“Reformed Egyptian” as a Script Designation

The claim that “there is no evidence ‘Reformed Egyptian’ was ever a language” confuses language with script. The Book of Mormon text itself (Mormon 9:32) explains that “Reformed Egyptian” was a script adapted by Nephite scribes from Egyptian because it could convey more information in less space — precisely the kind of adapted shorthand script that ancient scribes frequently developed. The Demotic script, Hieratic, and various cursive Egyptian adaptations are well-attested examples of this scribal phenomenon. The absence of the specific label “Reformed Egyptian” in extant ancient records is a trivially weak argument against the existence of adapted Semitic-Egyptian writing systems.

Furthermore, Royal Skousen’s monumental critical text project on the Book of Mormon — spanning decades of meticulous textual analysis — documents extensive Early Modern English grammatical structures in the original manuscript that neither Joseph Smith nor his contemporaries would have produced naturally. Stanford Carmack’s linguistic analysis demonstrates that the Book of Mormon reflects grammatical patterns consistent with 16th-century English, not 19th-century frontier dialect. This is powerful evidence of a transmission process external to Joseph’s own compositional abilities.

III. The Pure Adamic Language

LDS Discussions ridicules Joseph’s 1832 “Sample of Pure Language” as crudely modified English. Several contextual factors are entirely omitted from the critique.

First, the Adamic language sample was never canonized, was never published by Joseph Smith as scripture, and appears in an informal document described as “a sample” — not a revealed translation. David Golding’s analysis in Producing Ancient Scripture identifies this project as part of Joseph’s broader “pure language” exploratory work, which itself has legitimate precursors in 19th-century religious and intellectual culture including Swedenborgian, Kabbalistic, and Millerite traditions.

Second, LDS Discussions’s refutation depends entirely on the premise that Adam and Eve are a modern etiological myth. This is a contested scholarly position — not established consensus — and conflating the scholarly debate about genre with a decisive disproof of Joseph’s prophetic claims is a non-sequitur. One can hold that Genesis 2–3 contains mythological elements while affirming that proto-human language existed, that humanity descended from common ancestors, and that Joseph was exploring a genuine spiritual tradition.

Third, the “it sounds like English” argument has been applied reductively to every ancient language reconstruction in the 19th century. Proponents of proto-Semitic, Sanskrit, and early Kabbalistic Hebrew all operated within frameworks that modern critics find naive. Applying 21st-century linguistic standards to an 1832 religious document and declaring fraud is anachronistic rather than scholarly.

IV. The Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible (JST)

LDS Discussions treats the discovery that Joseph consulted Adam Clarke’s Bible commentary as a devastating exposure of fraud. Kent P. Jackson — the leading non-polemical JST scholar — has directly investigated the Clarke dependency thesis and found it wanting.

“There is no evidence that Joseph Smith ever used Clarke’s commentary… [the] proposed similarities cannot withstand careful scrutiny.”
— Kent P. Jackson, Scripture Central KnoWhy analysis

Jackson’s findings are specific and empirically grounded:

• No physical evidence: No copy of Clarke’s commentary has been documented in Joseph Smith’s possession or among his scribes during the translation period. The sole contemporaneous reference to Clarke comes from an 1843 antagonistic Methodist publication, secondhand and motivated.
• Textual parallels are superficial: Jackson found that the alleged parallels affect only a small fraction of the JST changes, that many claimed parallels involve common translation choices, and that some JST passages actually contradict Clarke’s stated positions — the opposite of copying.
• The substantive content cannot be attributed to Clarke: Entire new textual blocks in the JST — including chapters of Moses, the book of Enoch, and large expansions of Matthew — have no analog in Clarke or any other contemporary commentary. Fabricating them required either extraordinary creative invention or something else entirely.

Moreover, the positive case for the JST is substantial. The Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscript discoveries made after Joseph Smith’s death have repeatedly confirmed JST readings that diverged from the King James Bible. Several JST clarifications align with early Christian textual traditions Joseph could not have known. Robert J. Matthews’ meticulous scholarship, A Plainer Translation (BYU Press, 1975), documents these convergences systematically.

LDS Discussions’s argument here is structurally identical to saying that because a medical researcher reads textbooks, his original discoveries are fabricated. Using available scholarly resources while producing inspired translation is not contradiction — it is exactly what D&C 88:118 commands: “seek ye out of the best books words of wisdom; seek learning, even by study and also by faith.”

V. The Book of Abraham: The Central Battleground

LDS Discussions states “the church itself admits that the papyrus fragments have nothing to do with Abraham.” This is a severe misreading of the Church’s Gospel Topics Essay and of the scholarly landscape. The Church’s essay is carefully worded: it states that the recovered fragments — a subset of the original papyri collection — contain funerary texts unrelated to Abraham. This is not the same as admitting the Book of Abraham is fabricated.

The Lost Scroll Evidence Is Substantial

Multiple eyewitness accounts describe Joseph Smith possessing multiple long scrolls of papyrus — far more material than the eleven fragments recovered after the 1871 Chicago fire. Eyewitnesses used phrases like “a long roll” and “quite a number of rolls.” The fragments recovered represent only a portion of the original collection. The source document for the Book of Abraham may well have been on papyri that were destroyed. LDS Discussions presents the fragment-text mismatch as decisive without acknowledging this fundamental evidentiary gap.

The Catalyst Theory Has Scholarly Warrant

The Church’s Gospel Topics Essay presents the possibility that the papyri “provided an occasion for meditation, reflection, and revelation” through which God communicated Abrahamic teachings to Joseph — regardless of the literal linguistic content of the papyri. This is not a desperate ad hoc rescue; it is consistent with Joseph’s own stated methodology across all his translation projects. The Book of Moses was produced without any physical source document whatsoever; Joseph simply opened his Bible and revelation followed. The precedent for catalytic, revelatory translation was established years before the Abraham papyri arrived.

The Ancient Content Cannot Be Explained Away

Smoot, Gee, Muhlestein, and Thompson’s peer-reviewed scholarship in BYU Studies documents Book of Abraham content that aligns with ancient Near Eastern cosmologies unavailable to Joseph Smith in 1835:

• The Divine Council: The Book of Abraham’s depiction of pre-mortal divine council (Abraham 3:22–28) mirrors ancient Near Eastern cosmology documented in texts like the Ugaritic literature and Dead Sea Scrolls that were entirely unknown in Joseph’s day.
• Creation from Chaos: Abraham 4–5 depicts creation as organization from pre-existing matter (“organized and formed”) rather than ex nihilo — a theologically distinctive position corroborated by ancient Jewish and early Christian sources Joseph could not have accessed.
• The Name Zeptah/Egyptus: Smoot documents that the name “Zeptah” appearing in early manuscript stages corresponds to authentic Egyptian Siptah (“son of Ptah”) — a genuine ancient name Joseph revised to “Egyptus” for publication, suggesting contact with real Egyptian material in some form.
• Kokob and Gnolaum: These Hebrew/Semitic vocabulary items (“star” and “eternal”) are attested in cognate Semitic languages predating Hebrew itself, demonstrating authentic linguistic depth.

The Facsimile Interpretations in Context

LDS Discussions places great weight on discrepancies between Joseph’s Facsimile 3 explanations and standard Egyptological readings. This argument is more nuanced than critics allow. First, even Egyptologists do not agree on a single definitive reading of all the figures. Second, Joseph’s interpretations were offered in a specific theological framework that assigned multi-layered meaning to religious iconography — a practice attested in Jewish and early Christian midrash. Third, Kerry Muhlestein and other Egyptologist-scholars have documented that several of Joseph’s identifications are defensible within the religious context of the vignettes and need not be dismissed as simple error. The scene Joseph identified with Abraham standing before Pharaoh does depict a figure standing before an enthroned deity — the interpretive disagreement concerns which figures represent which identities, not whether the scene depicts what Joseph described.

The cumulative case is this: a 29-year-old farmer with limited formal education produced a text in 1835–1842 whose theological sophistication, ancient Near Eastern accuracy, and linguistic authenticity continue to generate serious peer-reviewed scholarly defense 190 years later. LDS Discussions asks us to explain this on the hypothesis of pure fabrication. The fabrication hypothesis requires Joseph Smith to have independently discovered or intuited cosmological frameworks, Hebrew vocabulary, ancient creation mythologies, and divine council theology that mainstream biblical scholarship would not document for another century. The inspired translation hypothesis requires considerably less.

VI. The Kinderhook Plates: A Limited and Misrepresented Episode

LDS Discussions presents the Kinderhook Plates as confirmation that Joseph Smith could not distinguish genuine artifacts from forgeries. The definitive scholarly treatment of this episode — Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee’s 70-page chapter in the RSC volume No Weapon Shall Prosper — reaches a starkly different conclusion.

Bradley and Ashurst-McGee demonstrate that Joseph Smith did not translate the Kinderhook Plates as a prophet. He examined them using his Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language (GAEL) — a secular, academic linguistic tool. He found a character resembling one in the GAEL and offered a tentative identification. This was scholarly dabbling, not prophetic declaration. William Clayton’s journal entry — the primary source LDS Discussions quotes — reflects Clayton’s own enthusiasm and interpretation, not necessarily a formal prophetic pronouncement by Joseph himself.

The Deseret News coverage of the 2011 FAIR conference summarized Ashurst-McGee’s conclusion directly: “Joseph Smith didn’t act in [a] prophet’s role during [the] translation of Kinderhook plates.” This distinction — between Joseph the curious linguist and Joseph the inspired prophet — is precisely what LDS Discussions collapses. When a prophet examines an artifact as a scholar, his secular guess does not constitute a prophetic translation. Every subsequent revelation from Joseph Smith came with explicit prophetic framing; the Kinderhook “translation” never did.

Moreover, the LDS Discussions argument here proves too much. By this logic, if a legitimate prophet makes an uninspired scholarly mistake in a casual setting, his entire prophetic ministry is invalidated. This standard would disqualify every ancient prophet whose writings contain any error, approximation, or culturally contingent statement — including the biblical authors LDS Discussions implicitly respects when using their scholarship.

VII. D&C 93 and the Writings of John

LDS Discussions relies on David Bokovoy’s analysis to argue that D&C 93 reflects a Christology inconsistent with the Gospel of John. This is a genuine and interesting scholarly question. It is not, however, the rebuttal LDS Discussions suggests it is.

Bokovoy’s argument assumes that the Gospel of John as we have it represents the totality of what the historical John taught or believed. But LDS Discussions elsewhere acknowledges the Johannine literature has a complex compositional history and that the canonical gospels are not verbatim transcriptions. If the canonical Gospel of John represents a theologically developed, later edited document — as critical scholarship extensively argues — then D&C 93’s depiction of an earlier stratum of John’s thinking is entirely compatible with critical scholarship. Indeed, Bart Ehrman and other secular biblical critics have argued at length that early Christianity contained a diversity of Christological views that later orthodoxy suppressed. D&C 93 fits comfortably within that documented diversity.

Furthermore, using the tools of historical-critical biblical scholarship to establish what the “real” John believed, and then using that reconstruction to invalidate a revelation, requires the critic to grant enormous authority to modern scholarship while denying any authority to prophetic revelation. This is not a neutral standard; it is a question-begging one.

VIII. The “Probability” Argument: A Case Study in Misapplied Statistics

LDS Discussions concludes with a probability argument: multiply the chances Joseph got each translation right, and the odds become “0.000000000001%.” This argument has a fundamental logical flaw: it treats the critic’s interpretation of each translation as established fact, assigns enormous confidence to each negative verdict, and then multiplies those confidence values as if they were independent. But they are not independent — they all depend on the same foundational assumption that inspired translation is impossible.

If you begin by assigning probability zero to divine revelation, then every subsequent probability calculation simply reflects that prior commitment. The math is not informing the conclusion; the metaphysical commitment is. A properly applied Bayesian analysis must account for:

• The probability of a 19th-century farm boy producing the Book of Abraham’s ancient cosmological content without access to ancient Near Eastern sources;
• The probability of the Book of Mormon reflecting Early Modern English grammatical patterns uncharacteristic of Joseph’s own writing;
• The probability that JST changes independently converge with Dead Sea Scroll readings unknown to Joseph;
• The positive evidence for each translation project that LDS Discussions either ignores or minimizes.

When these are included in the calculation, the probability picture looks very different. The Interpreter Foundation’s scholarship on Joseph Smith’s translation projects addresses precisely this point: positive hits, not just negative verdicts, must be part of an honest probabilistic assessment.

IX. The “Evaluate Joseph Like Any Other Leader” Standard

LDS Discussions closes with a rhetorical challenge: evaluate Joseph Smith as you would Warren Jeffs or the Pope. This is less a scholarly argument than a rhetorical framing device — but let us accept it.

When we evaluate the Prophet Muhammad, we recognize that his followers’ claims cannot be assessed purely by whether the Quran matches contemporary Arab linguistic conventions — because its proponents argue for divine origin. When we evaluate Moses, we do not dismiss the Pentateuch because it contains mythological genre elements recognized by modern scholars. When we evaluate the apostle Paul, we do not invalidate his letters because his theology of Christ developed over time. In every case, historians and scholars recognize the distinction between understanding how a religious document was produced and adjudicating its ultimate truth claims.

Applying this genuinely equal standard to Joseph Smith means acknowledging that the presence of human elements, cultural influences, and evolving understanding in his translation projects does not automatically invalidate those projects any more than it invalidates the Pauline epistles, the Quran, or the Psalms. Producing Ancient Scripture — the most comprehensive scholarly examination of Joseph Smith’s translations to date — explicitly frames its analysis around understanding “the humanity in the development of scripture” while leaving open the question of divine participation. That is the scholarly standard. LDS Discussions does not apply it.

X. Conclusion: What the Evidence Actually Shows

LDS Discussions calls for readers to look for “patterns” in Joseph’s translations. We agree. Here are the patterns the evidence actually reveals when examined without a predetermined conclusion:

• Consistency of method: Across every project, Joseph described translation as a revelatory gift rather than academic skill — a claim that is coherent and consistent, not the shifting story of a fraud.
• Ancient content confirmed after the fact: Multiple elements of both the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham have been corroborated by ancient Near Eastern scholarship conducted after Joseph’s death, when fabrication was no longer possible.
• Intellectual engagement alongside revelation: Joseph actively studied Hebrew, consulted commentaries, and engaged scholarly resources. This is fully compatible with inspired translation and actually demonstrates the kind of serious engagement one expects from a genuine prophetic figure.
• Scholarly seriousness: The Book of Abraham, the JST, and the Book of Mormon continue to generate rigorous peer-reviewed scholarship from trained historians, Egyptologists, and linguists who find the texts worthy of serious analysis. Fabrications do not sustain this level of scholarly interest for two centuries.

LDS Discussions asks readers to view all of this “in totality.” So do we. In totality, the evidence produces a picture of a prophetic figure whose translations bear hallmarks of genuine ancient contact, whose methods were explicitly revelatory rather than academic, whose productions exceed what fabrication can plausibly explain, and whose legacy continues to be taken seriously by serious scholars.

That is not the picture of a fraud. It is the picture of a prophet.

Sources and Further Reading

Stephen O. Smoot, “Joseph Smith Jr. as a Translator: The Book of Abraham as a Case Study,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 64 (2025): 345–376. interpreterfoundation.org

Brant A. Gardner, ed., Producing Ancient Scripture: Joseph Smith’s Translation Projects in the Development of Mormon Christianity (University of Utah Press, 2020). Reviewed at Interpreter Foundation.

Kent P. Jackson, “Did the Joseph Smith Translation of the Bible Rely on Scholarly Commentaries?” Scripture Central KnoWhy. scripturecentral.org

Stephen O. Smoot, John Gee, Kerry Muhlestein, and John S. Thompson, “How Did Joseph Smith Translate the Book of Abraham?” BYU Studies Quarterly. byustudies.byu.edu

Don Bradley and Mark Ashurst-McGee, “‘President Joseph Has Translated a Portion’: Joseph Smith and the Mistranslation of the Kinderhook Plates,” in No Weapon Shall Prosper (Religious Studies Center, BYU, 2011). rsc.byu.edu

“Book of Abraham Translation,” Gospel Topics Essay, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. churchofjesuschrist.org

Stephen O. Smoot, “How Did Joseph Smith Translate the Book of Abraham?” From the Desk (interview with Kurt Manwaring). fromthedesk.org

FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Joseph Smith and the Translation Process.” fairlatterdaysaints.org