Question: How could the plate text actually fit on the plates of the Book of Mormon?

Could the text of the Book of Mormon have actually fit on the Book of Mormon plates?

Summary: Critics of the Book of Mormon seek any angle possible to discredit its claimed divine origins. One of the ways that critics have done this is by examining the witness accounts of the dimensions of the plates from whence the Book of Mormon is purported to have been translated and asking whether the Book of Mormon text could have fit on the plates as described.

Some critics have claimed that, no, the untranslated text of the Book of Mormon could not have fit on the plates as witnesses described them.

The Research of Josh Coates

Josh Coates, managing director of the B.H. Roberts Foundation, gave a fantastic presentation at the 2025 FAIR Conference in Lehi, UT. Coates’ presentation was based on a paper that he had previously published in Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship.

Coates took a combinatorial approach to deciphering the question of whether the text of the Book of Mormon could have fit on the gold plates. Coates combed through the witness accounts of the gold plates and found both an upper and lower limit for the various physical dimensions of the plates first. With that upper and lower limit, Coates could put those figures into a calculation and render over 4 billion possible combinations of plate dimensions. Coates then applied filters to the results such that they could be compatible with Joseph Smith's descriptions of the plates (who would have been the most reliable source regarding their dimensions given his familiarity) and the amount of void (or empty) space between the plates. All Coates' filters reduced his figure of 4 billion possible combinations to 37,657 possible combinations.

Coates then took a look at the possible height of characters that could be found on the gold plates. In order to do that, he used the research of Neal Rappleye, an associate researcher at the Ancient America Foundation. Rappleye took each of the accounts of the gold plates and matched each of their descriptions of the plates to known plate texts from the ancient world. In Rappleye's survey—with scripts including Greek, Demotic, Cuneiform, and other Semitic languages—it was found that ancients wrote from anywhere to sub-millimeter to over 9mm scripts. Coates also factored in that many languages have different translation densities. Different languages can convey the same amount of information with less writing. For example, Egyptian is a strictly logographic language and those logographs can contain a lot of information. Egyptians could thus theoretically convey the same message with less writing than English speakers could.

Coates took these considerations and applied upper and lower limits to the size of the plate text. He generated 1,987,536,460 possible combinations. Not all of these were compatible with the physical plate possibilities he generated first, so he had to filter the results such that they were compatible. This gave Coates 3,493,916 possibilities. Coates applied two more filters to the results. He excluded all possibilities that were less dense than Hebrew since, as Moroni states, if the plates were sufficiently large, they would have written in Hebrew (Mormon 9:32–33). This withered Coates' results to 2,302,902 possible combinations. Finally, Coates removed all combinations that would make the text of the 116 lost pages longer than the small plates of Nephi as contained in the books of 1 Nephi through Omni in the Book of Mormon. This gave us Coates' final count of 863,830 possible combinations of size of plate text with physical plate dimensions that are logically possible.

These two researchers’ findings, combined, explodes this shallow criticism of the Book of Mormon. For more, detailed argumentation, see the cited sources below.

Notes