Daniel Peterson wrote:But now, finally, an anecdote relating to the painting of the Eight Witnesses to the Book of Mormon with which I began this post:
Years ago, I was exchanging emails with a certain ex-Mormon, a colleague and ally and (certainly in this respect) a fellow-traveler of the much more accomplished Dan Vogel. Like Vogel, he maintains that the experience of the Eight Witnesses was visionary and subjective, not real. By contrast, I argue that the evidence overwhelming demonstrates their encounter with the plates to have been mundane, matter-of-fact, and lacking any significant element of the supernatural.
They went out into a grove of trees, I said, at about one o'clock on an ordinary afternoon, and there were the plates, sitting on a tree stump.
"There was no tree stump," he countered.
"Yes there was," I said. somewhat surprised at his insistence on a very peripheral issue.
"Show me the evidence," he demanded.
I told him that I certainly would, but suggested a bit cheekily that I was entirely willing to allow him the absence of a tree stump if he would grant me the existence of the plates.
He declined my offer.
I began to look for an account of the Eight Witness story including a tree stump. Such an account would, I thought, be very easy to find. I thought I remembered reading at least one. But time passed and I found none.
So I called Richard Lloyd Anderson, a good friend and, by many light years, the foremost authority (ever) on the Witnesses to the Book of Mormon.
Not a problem, he said. He'd get right back to me with a good reference to a tree stump featuring in the experience of the Eight Witnesses.
After a few days, he called me and acknowledged that he couldn't actually find such a reference. And, as we pondered the situation, we decided that we had been influenced by the bit of Church illustration that appears at the top of this entry. There may well have been a tree stump, but no account mentions it, and we simply assumed it.
Artistic representations do absolutely affect our imaginations and expectations, and we need to be wary about allowing them to mislead us.
The sources are emphatic, however, that there were plates, and it still seems to me beyond reasonable dispute that the experience of the Eight Witnesses, even unaccompanied by that tree stump, was prosaic, objectively real, and entirely empirical.
I find this entry absolutely fascinating. It prompts me to wonder whether the problem ends with the stump, or only just begins there. To what extent do people come to add substance to events of the past simply because they have seen images depicting them?
More to the point, how did the men who were shown the plates know what it was that they were looking at? Just like Dr. Peterson populating his historical imagination with a stump for which no evidence exists in history, Joseph Smith told these men that an angel had entrusted him with ancient plates of gold that belonged to an ancient Hebraic civilization that once lived in America.
Joseph had experience telling such stories about ancient treasures hidden in the earth. He probably knew a thing or two about providing just enough physical evidence of the old pot or the chest to convince others that they had actually seen the container in which the treasure was kept.
In an age before archaeology really had its methodological footing and counterfeit relics were easily passed off as the real thing, even on the truly learned, would the inexpert locals, the family, friends, and acquaintances of Joseph Smith, have known to tell a genuine antiquity from a fake?
Of course, maybe Joseph Smith, the Palmyra treasure seer, was entrusted with plates by an angel named Moroni or Nephi. I can't say that he was not. On the other hand, perhaps Joseph Smith was the pious fraud that Dan Vogel says he was.