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I'm a fan of Uncle Dale's avatar also....and UD for that matter, and was just curious as to what are the theories for how exactly J. Smith did the hat trick. Did he memorize? Crib notes in the hat? False bottom hat? Glass bottom hat? Blue tooth alien tech?

Edit/add, Oh yeah.....Corrupt scribe?

What if the Hat Trick never really happened in the first place? What if it was an ex post facto invention, like the story of BY morphing into Joseph Smith?

Maybe it was just a magic trick. Magicians have always been with us. Some of them are very convincing.

Luman Walter, a.k.a. "Walters the Magician" certainly taught the young Joseph Smith Jr. a few tricks, and his pa, too...

Corpsegrinder wrote:What if the Hat Trick never really happened in the first place? What if it was an ex post facto invention, like the story of BY morphing into Joseph Smith?

That's probably it huh. Because, 'god spoke to my mind' just isn't tactile enough for the masses, Sure, they got together later and worked out a game plan. Still, I was pretty sold on the Urim an thummim spectacle angle. You'da thunk they coulda come up with something a little more feasible for us realists....like maybe say, a three Nephite dictated it or, Elvis sang it....

One of the questions that always bothered me when I was still a believer was this: Why didn't Joseph Smith make any charcoal rubbings of the engravings on the plates? It would've been a fast and easy way to provide us with an accurate representation of the so-called Reformed Egyptian script. It was this one question--along with a few other things--that led me to the conclusion that the translation story was a tall tale.

There are too many direct witnesses to the face-in-the-hat thing to reasonably suggest it wasn't used. David Whitmer mentions it and I think he was one of Smiths duped marks, much like Martin Harris. I've come to believe that Oliver Cowdery was in on Smith's ruse, to at least some extent, and when Cowdery was acting as scribe, the hat-trick wasn't likely necessary, unless there were onlookers who needed convincing.

And the sometimes-need for a blanket to separate Smith from his scribe speaks clearly of shenanigans. Harris and Whitmer both knew of the seer-stone in the hat method, so why did Smith need to use the blanket? The most likely reason wasn't because God Himself forbade them to see, it was clearly so Smith could read directly from his crib notes without detection.

Is there any way to determine which parts and how much were translated via the face-in-the-hat method, vs. the behind-the-blanket method?

Ya know, another way that god coulda gotten us the book, with a lot less skulduggery.....would have been to just have a farmer plow up the plates, give em to an authority and have a scholar translate them. Why wouldn't that work? Why all the secrecy and sacredness? It's just a history book right?

tana wrote:Ya know, another way that god coulda gotten us the book, with a lot less skulduggery.....would have been to just have a farmer plow up the plates, give em to an authority and have a scholar translate them. Why wouldn't that work? Why all the secrecy and sacredness? It's just a history book right?

Exactly. And why did the dumb things have to be made out of gold? Brass worked just fine for the Kinderhook Plates...oh wait, those were phony, right?