Bob

I see two possibilities. One is that he truly found some gold-plated tablets and did a “translation” of them. The second is that he plagiarized different sources and added some of his own.

The first explanation has numerous issues. How did he carry these plates back to his house? Those plates would have been very heavy to contain that much information. In his account, he was attacked on his way home so he had to somehow run while carrying said plates. That is not believable.

The whole idea of there being plates was ludicrous given how he “translated” them. He put his tophat upside down on the table and put his seer stone at the bottom of the hat. He placed his face in the top of the hat and claims to have seen one “Reformed Egyptian” hieroglyph at a time then its meaning in English. If that’s how it occurred, then why the plates? He wasn’t actually looking at the plates while translating. This is similar to the account of how he “translated” the Book of Abraham. He has some ancient Egyptian funeral texts that said nothing about Abraham yet he did a “spiritual translation” and came up with the Book of Abraham. Who needs plates or papers when you “translate” that way?

Naturally, the angel Moroni took the plates before he was done and so no one can verify the existence of the plates. There is also no known language that he claims were inscribed on the plates. Since God detests sorcery, why would God have Smith use a “seer stone”? The LDS church tries to explain that by making reference to the OT description of the Urim and Thummim used on Aaron’s breastplate. While those were two stones on a breastplate, they try to describe them as a class of stones used for prophetic messages but that is not consistent with how they are used in the OT.

Besides you could never get that much text from that few of characters so once again you are asked to take on faith that some kind of spiritual translation was taking place.

It’s possible what Smith saw was real in some fashion but the product of demonic activity. What he saw in his hat was likewise of demonic origin. Satan loves to counterfeit the things of God. Just make something up a little off from the truth and get people to believe in it rather than the truth. That works for Satan.

He could have made the whole thing up. There were books by Nathan Smith and Solomon Spaulding that man may have been source material for the Book of Mormon. Time does not permit me to go into the details. You can google those names and read all about it.

Personally, I don’t think Smith was literate enough or smart enough to come up with all this on his own. I believe he was demonically manipulated. Nothing about the story makes sense. It is not how God had the Bible authored. The message is inconsistent with the Bible. Archaeology does not support anything in the BOM despite supporting names, places, and events of Biblical accounts which are much older. Smith claimed God chose him to “restore the Gospel” yet there is no evidence the Gospel/Bible needed restoring. There is no evidence many “plain and precious” truths were lost. The evidence is strong to the contrary. The BOM has changed and has many internal inconsistencies. It and the LDS church are a testimony to the power of Satan and the spiritual blindness of man.