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During a break in the translation of the first 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith and Martin Harris took a break and walked out to the river. Harris noted one of the stones at the river's edge looked remarkably (to him) like the seer stone Smith was using to translate. He pockets the stone and the two eventually head back inside to resume their labors. During a moment when Harris has determined that Smith is distracted, Harris pockets Joseph's seer stone and drops in its place the stone he had recently found at the river.

When Smith attempts to begin translation, he finds he is unable. He is confounded. The words simply won't come.

Harris admits that he has swapped the stone with an impostor, and returns to Smith the original seer stone. The translation work was then able to begin again without difficulty.

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This is my recollection of the events as originally related by Harris, and preserved in extant records. If anyone needs references, please let me know and I can dig. In any case, I expect that any who are knowledgable about church history will largely agree that this account accurately portrays the event in question. That is, I believe that both critics and apologists will accept this summary of those events as being substantially accurate.

So, the question I have to our believers here: How do you make sense of this account? Keep the following in mind: Within the bounds your belief that Joseph Smith was a true prophet and that he truly translated the Gold Plates via the gift and power of God, from this account there appears to be some portion of that Godly, priesthood power which was imbued not within Joseph Smith, but within the very stone itself. If we are to believe Harris, Smith did not know of the swap and presumably had all the same faith that he had during the previous session before the break and during all the previous days of translation. Yet, if we take this story at face value, the absence of the stone seems to have interfered with the process of translation.

I am interested in hearing how active LDS believers view this event. Are there any modern-day analogues in LDS practices which mirror the idea that there is Godly power imbued within an inanimate object? During my four decades in the church, I cannot recall a single instance, but I may be forgetting...

Anyone?

That's a very good point. It puts the lie to the whole "Joseph studied it out in his mind" excuse for the book's errors.

Some stones may resemble the shards of the Minas Ithil stone, but they do not have the power.

Dr. Shades wrote:That's a very good point. It puts the lie to the whole "Joseph studied it out in his mind" excuse for the book's errors.

Yes, I agree that it is problematic.

As a note of explanation, I hold a critical view of this story. I believe Harris told it exactly as he experienced it. I have no doubts whatsoever that Harris recounted the major points of this event as they occurred and as he understood them. My view, however, is that Smith was immediately aware of the swap at the moment he either saw or lifted in his hand the impostor stone. He immediately understood the ramifications of the swap and what Harris was doing; testing him. And he gave Harris what he was looking for: 'Proof' that the seer stone was actually functioning in the process of translation.

I have seen apologists point to this account and claim that it bolsters the faithful view. But for this account to add credence to Joseph Smith's story, the stone must have been a key element in the translation process, the absence of which confounded Smith despite his continued faith.

If an apologist makes the claim that the stone was common, that it was simply Smith's faith and the mantle of his calling which gave him the power to perform, this event does not fit. In this case, the event shows that Smith was feigning the stupor to trick Harris.

If an apologist make the claim that the stone was imbued with Godly power, he is then burdened with the task of explaining the nature of this power and how this power is now absent from the relics of our modern age.

To my view, this is a substantial issue for those who hold faith that Smith was the true prophet he claimed to be. In either case, either true power in the stone or simply an inert prop, the ramifications are difficult to defend.

moksha wrote:Some stones may resemble the shards of the Minas Ithil stone, but they do not have the power.

Moksha,

Your reference to the storied stones of a widely read fantasy book, full of invented characters and imaginary places, is quite apt, and no doubt intentional. ;-)

The seer stones that Joseph Smith used are very unique looking. Finding one that would fool Joesph Smith, who had looked at it for months from a very close distance, seems improbable.

The primary takeaway for me in this infamous bit of Mormon history is that Martin Harris must've been an incredibly naïve person to believe that Smith wouldn't be able to recognize his own seer stone was not there. The details of this episode, if accurate, also are a line in a substantial body of evidence that Smith was portraying himself to be engaged in a readerly translation process where physical words were being read off of the stone.

Fence Sitter wrote:The seer stones that Joseph Smith used are very unique looking. Finding one that would fool Joesph Smith, who had looked at it for months from a very close distance, seems improbable.

Agree. Knowing Harris was a dolt, the con man spotted the set up and played it, much like this parlor trick from FAIR...

http://www.fairwiki.org/Joseph_Smith/Seer_stones

I was at the house of his father in Manchester, two miles south of Palmyra village, and was picking my teeth with a pin while sitting on the bars. The pin caught in my teeth and dropped from my fingers into shavings and straw. I jumped from the bars and looked for it. Joseph and Northrop Sweet also did the same. We could not find it. I then took Joseph on surprise, and said to him--I said, "Take your stone." I had never seen it, and did not know that he had it with him. He had it in his pocket. He took it and placed it in his hat--the old white hat--and placed his face in his hat. I watched him closely to see that he did not look to one side; he reached out his hand beyond me on the right, and moved a little stick and there I saw the pin, which he picked up and gave to me. I know he did not look out of the hat until after he had picked up the pin.

By what power did Joseph Smith find the pin? A logical mind would conclude that Joe Smith saw the pin and used the parlor tick to dupe Harris into believing he "saw" it with his magic rock, but take it one step further... by what power did Joseph Smith's magic rock work? Did God guide Joe Smith to find the pin?

Joethecoxman got his power and priesthood from The God of This World, as we see in the Temple. He saw The God of This World in the answer to his prayers. This individual never identified himself as God the Father, or Eloheim or anything like it - he left his identity to be assumed.

The black magic peepstone fits The God of This World and makes sense. Much more so that Jesus and his Father having anything to do with it.

To reiterate, if the details of this account are accurate let's look at another possibility. Joseph may have recognized the stone was swapped either by spiritual inspiration or physical recognition.

If Joseph believed in "seer stones" (many statements make that claim), and it is very likely that he did since it was common for the time and region for people to believe in them, he may have thought that he needed "his" special stone for the translation to work. Or the LORD knew what Martin Harris was up to and delayed the work which caused Joseph to realize something was wrong.

I believe the LORD uses us in ways that are natural to us. If his natural trust in a "seer stone" helped him to "tune" into the divine influence so he could perform the work, so be it.

The important key is that the Book of Mormon was the result.