How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism Sonia Hazard Encounters with material objects lie at the heart of Mormonism’s origin story. The story goes like this: Late one night in September 1823, an angel visited the bedside of a young Joseph Smith to tell him of one of these objects—a sacred book written on plates of gold, buried on a hillside not far from the Smith family’s farm in upstate New York. When, the next day, Smith found the gold plates as directed, the divine being reappeared with further instructions. This time, he forbade Smith from removing the plates but beckoned him to return to the site year after year. In 1827, on Smith’s fifth annual visit, the angel finally allowed him to collect the plates and take them home. Over the next several months, Smith kept them securely hidden and revealed them only to a select group of witnesses. Using a seer stone, he translated the plates’ inscriptions from their mysterious language into English. Trusted companions served as scribes. The translation revealed that the plates were created several hundred years before the birth of Christ by the angel Moroni and his father Mormon, and recorded the extraordinary history of their Nephite clan, which had migrated to the American continent from Jerusalem. In June 1829, shortly after the translation was complete, Moroni directed Smith to return the gold plates (in some accounts, by depositing them in a cave). Smith obeyed. Then Smith arranged for the publication of the manuscript in nearby Palmyra, which appeared in 1830 as the first edition of the Book of Mormon. 1 If the gold plates are not to be excluded outright from consideration, regarded as fakes or as part of a tall tale, then how might they be incorporated into scholarly explanations? Historians of religion who have confronted this question have approached the story of the plates sympathetically in an effort to recognize its meaning and efficacy for Smith and other early Mormons. By and large, they rely on two interpretative paradigms: religious Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation, Vol. 31, Issue 2, pp. 137–192, ISSN: 1052- 1151, electronic ISSN: 1533-8568. © 2021 by The Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the Cambridge University Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://www.cambridge.org/about‐us/rights‐permissions. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.11. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/rac.2021.11 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. Florida State University, Music, on 05 Sep 2021 at 18:13:49, subject to the Cambridge Core