Detailed response to CES Letter, Kinderhook Plates & Translator Claims

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Response to "Kinderhook Plates and Translator & Seer Claims Concerns & Questions"

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A FAIR Analysis of: [[../|Letter to a CES Director]] A work by author: Jeremy Runnells

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Responses to the original "Letter to a CES Director"

• Response to section: Kinderhook Plates
• Response to section: Book of Mormon

Responses to "Debunking FairMormon - Letter to a CES Director"

• "Joseph Smith was parading around and showing others the Egyptian hieroglyphics he copied off the gold plates around the same time as the discovery of the Kinderhook Plates."

Kinderhook Plates

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Source(s) of the criticism

• MormonThink.com website (as of 28 April 2012). Page: http://mormonthink.com/joseph-smith-polygamy.htm
• George D. Smith, Nauvoo Polygamy: "...but we called it celestial marriage" (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2008), 3. ( Index of claims , (Detailed book review))

"Joseph Smith was parading around and showing others the Egyptian hieroglyphics he copied off the gold plates around the same time as the discovery of the Kinderhook Plates."

1. REDIRECT Was the practice of polygamy against the law in Illinois in the 1840s?

Book of Mormon

The "Urim and Thummim" used by Joseph Smith to translate the "gold plates"

Jump to details:

• Question: Did Joseph Smith use the Nephite interpreters to translate? Or did he use his own seer stone?
• Question: What are the Nephite interpreters?
• Question: Did Joseph Smith use his own seer stone to translate the Book of Mormon?
• Question: Has the Church tried to hide Joseph's use of a seer stone?
• Gospel Topics: "Joseph placed either the interpreters or the seer stone in a hat"
• Question: Did Joseph ever place the Nephite interpreters ("Urim and Thummim") into his hat?
• Gospel Topics: "Joseph Smith and his associates often used the term 'Urim and Thummim' to refer to the single stone as well as the interpreters"
• Ensign (Jan. 2013): "He...referred to it using an Old Testament term, Urim and Thummim...He also sometimes applied the term to other stones he possessed"
• W.W. Phelps (1833): "through the aid of a pair of Interpreters, or spectacles—(known, perhaps, in ancient days as Teraphim, or Urim and Thummim)"
• Question: Which method of translation was more "believable": seer stone or Nephite interpreters?
• Question: What does the Church teach investigators and members regarding the method by which the Book of Mormon was produced?