Another recent thread raises the idea of sneaky equivocation in Mormon statements about polygamy. I see some potential equivocation in the collectively signed witness statements.
8 Witnesses wrote:Joseph Smith, Jun., the translator of this work, has shown unto us the plates of which hath been spoken, which have the appearance of gold; and as many of the leaves as the said Smith has translated we did handle with our hands; and we also saw the engravings thereon ... we have seen and hefted, and know of a surety that the said Smith has got the plates of which we have spoken.
A quick reading of this famous statement probably seems to imply that the witnesses handled the golden plates. If I read closely, however, I notice that they
saw plates but
handled "leaves"—and only the "leaves" that had been translated up to that point.
If the witnesses really had handled the individual plates, then it would be a bit odd for them to switch to calling them "leaves" in mid-statement. If they were leaf-like, why call them plates? If they were plate-like, why call them leaves? I also find it hard to imagine how, if they were handling the individual golden plates, they could be restricted to handling only those which Smith had translated. For that matter I find it hard to see why anyone would have wanted to restrict the plate-handling in that way. Finally, it would also be odd for the witnesses to mention only seeing and hefting, in their emphatic conclusion, if they had in fact handled the plates individually.
So I can't help imagining an alternative reading: perhaps the "leaves [that] the said Smith has translated" were simply the paper pages of Smith's English translation, and not the golden originals.
To be sure, there doesn't seem to be any great point in solemnly attesting to having handled a pile of modern paper with handwriting that everyone admitted had been produced only recently, by Smith and collaborators. There is a little bit of point to affirming that, though. If I showed you something that I was telling you was an ancient artifact, and at the same time I showed you some plaster casts that I said I had made of it, then when I later showed only the plaster casts and claimed that the artifact had been lost, you would be able to confirm that they were the same casts that I had showed you before, when I had also shown the artifact. So if you attested that I had once shown you both artifact and plaster casts at the same time, you'd be helping establish the association between the lost artifact and the still-extant casts.
If the eight witnesses were clearly remembering the event, and it had included passing around the paper leaves of Smith's supposed translation, then they might have been willing to sign the statement as it is written, with the idea that they were affirming an association between Smith's translation and the gold plates—or at any rate with the understanding that they were attesting to nothing more than what had indeed happened, handling paper leaves of the translation. With my reading, the eight witnesses might only actually have seen the plates from a distance, and hefted them inside a box, yet have been willing to affirm a statement that mentions handling leaves.
To people who weren't there, though, the same statement would suggest instead that the witnesses had really handled the individual plates.
If the witnesses had in fact handled individual plates, then their statement might still have mentioned "leaves" at that crucial point just through clumsiness in drafting the document. If saying "leaves" instead of "plates" was just a clumsy mistake in phrasing, it was an unfortunate slip, because it weakened the statement considerably. However "leaves" happened, the fact that it's there does seem to make the statement weaker than it seems at first reading.
I was a teenager before it was cool.
