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A FairMormon Response to Questions Asked in Swedish Fireside with Elder's Jensen and Turley

Question:
Alright, one of my questions is regarding the process of how the Book of Mormon came about. Growing up in the church I remember hearing when I was taught about how the Book of Mormon came about, especially the pictures shown to me in primary which had Joseph Smith sitting on one side of the curtain and his scribe on the other and Joseph Smith had the plates in front of him, translating from them. And also as a missionary and a Sunday School teacher, we taught and are taught, you know, the importance of the original plates and them coming about and how Nephi had to make the choice of killing Laban in order to get the plates, and how to pass them forward from father to son for a thousand years, and Moroni almost died trying to preserve them and finally they were buried in the hill Cumorah. And then finding out by recognized historians, even members of the church, how the process isn’t really corresponding with that picture. And the fact that how the Book of Mormon came about was actually by Joseph Smith looking into the hat in the seer stone, the stone that he found in a well, and the stone that he used both before and after becoming a prophet in seeking for treasure. And this — And the question to me that I don’t expect you to answer, but , you know, there’s a lot of efforts being made in order to make these plate come about and they weren’t even part of the process, they were hidden away most of the time, sometimes not even in the same room where the writing was being done. That’s one question obviously that I don’t expect you to answer.

Short Answer:

• Did Joseph translate the plates using both the Nephite interpreters (the "Urim and Thummim") and a seer stone? Yes.

To help him with the translation, Joseph found with the gold plates “a curious instrument which the ancients called Urim and Thummim, which consisted of two transparent stones set in a rim of a bow fastened to a breastplate.” Joseph also used an egg-shaped, brown rock for translating called a seer stone.
—“A Peaceful Heart,” Friend, September 1974, 7.

• Did Joseph translate the plates using a seer stone placed in a hat? Yes.

David Whitmer wrote: "Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine."
—Russell M. Nelson, “A Treasured Testament,” Ensign, July 1993, 61.

• Were both the Nephite interpreters and the seer stone referred to as the Urim and Thummim? Yes.

He described the instrument as “spectacles” and referred to it using an Old Testament term, Urim and Thummim (see Exodus 28:30). He also sometimes applied the term to other stones he possessed, called “seer stones” because they aided him in receiving revelations as a seer. The Prophet received some early revelations through the use of these seer stones.
—Gerrit Dirkmaat, "Great and Marvelous Are the Revelations of God," Ensign, January 2013.

• Did Joseph locate his seer stone while digging a well? Yes.

The seer stone referred to here was a chocolate-colored, somewhat egg-shaped stone which the Prophet found while digging a well in company with his brother Hyrum. It possessed the qualities of Urim and Thummim, since by means of it-as described above-as well as by means of the “Interpreters” found with the Nephite record, Joseph was able to translate the characters engraven on the plates.
—B. H. Roberts, Defense of the Faith and the Saints (Salt Lake City: Deseret News, 1907), 1:257.

For a detailed answer, we recommend:

{{{extauthor}}}, "The Spectacles, the Stone, the Hat, and the Book: A Twenty-first Century Believer’s View of the Book of Mormon Translation," {{{extpublication}}} —This essay seeks to examine the Book of Mormon translation method from the perspective of a regular, nonscholarly, believing member in the twenty-first century, by taking into account both what is learned in Church and what can be learned from historical records that are now easily available. (Click here for full article)

Question:
But the second question is why? Why don’t we present this [0:33:55]? Why, why do we still keep to this version that the plates were used in an actual translation process which my understanding is using a document and moving over to another document. Why [0:34:09] some sort of revelation, more or less, that may [0:34:12]? So that’s my question. Cause, I don’t see that the Church that they really correspond with what really happened.

Short Answer: