Talk:Golden plates

Brass Plates

Question: would more information on brass plates work better here or on Latter Day Saint movement and engraved metal plates? BenBeckstromBYU (talk) 22:27, 16 February 2024 (UTC)

Neither page is in particularly good condition or makes for all that great a receptacle, this one being overwhelmed with excessive primary source use and the other being an awkward neologism that mashes together several discrete topics. I would be more in favor of a discrete article on the brass plates as a literary topic and religious idea. Hydrangeans (she/her | talk | edits) 01:09, 17 February 2024 (UTC)

Sigh

It needs to be stated outright that the plates — atleast in the manner described by Joseph Smith — never existed in reality. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:21, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

In any case, I will be making a list of primary and/or otherwise unreliable (see WP:HISTRS) sources. Anything sourced to them will be removed. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:25, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Fyi, @Levivich. TrangaBellam (talk) 18:50, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Why does Wikipedia have so many pages?! 😭 Levivich (talk) 18:54, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I was going through the Mormon Multiverse and oh, my — ! TrangaBellam (talk) 18:58, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

Sources to discard

All articles/books/pamphlets/plates/cups/... described in this section ought not be directly used as RS-es:

• Joseph Smith and all his relatives, Brigham Young, Orson Pratt, Oliver Cowdery, Willard Chase, W. W. Phelps, David Whitmer, Abram Benton, Clark Braden, Abner Cole, Stpehen Burnett, John H. Gilbert, and Eber D. Howe.

• Pratt was an original member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of the Church of Christ. Cowdery was, again, an important participant in the formative period of the LDS movement. Chase was an an early associate of Smith. Phelps was a honcho in the early-days as was Whitmer. Benton was a contemporary of Smith who had once accused him of being a fraud; Braden was yet another contemporary though a die-hard opponent of the LDS as was Cole. Burnett was a disgruntled ex-Mormon. Gilbert was the typesetter of the Book. Howe was among the first polemical critics of Smith and LDS.

• They are primary sources and hence concerns of dueness are abound.

• B. H. Roberts.

• Too old notwithstanding that he was leader in the LDS Church. He had a curious relationship with the Church but nonetheless, an example of religious-apologist scholarship.

• Charles Anthon

• A primary source in light of the Anthon Transcript affair.

• Any and all news articles pre-dating 1950, at least.
• Publications in Improvement Era, Mormon Studies Review, and Journal of Book of Mormon Studies.

• Religious-apolegetic scholarship.

In other words, >75% of the sources need to be nuked. Absent opposition, I will go ahead — there is ample material on the subject that is written by decent academic historians and published by decent academic press. TrangaBellam (talk) 19:49, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

I agree and would go further. This entire article can and should be written exclusively with 21st century sources, modern scholarship, WP:AGEMATTERS and there is plenty of it to draw from. I agree about the apologetics also. Levivich (talk) 23:19, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

@Levivich: I was taking a look at the landscape-of-21st-century-sources and, umm, we have a difficult task at hand.

Let's take Bushman, who was a Chair Proffesor of History at Columbia University — his works on LDS have been published by the most reputed of academic presses and have been cited hundreds of times; in 2008, OUP commissioned Bushman to write the volume on Mormonism in their famed Very Short Introduction Series and it speaks to the acclaim commanded by Bushman in the field. Not only can you not deny his reliability but also it is hard to argue that his views shall not command significant weight.

So, what is Bushman's views on our subject? While I am yet to read his latest work (2023; OUP), Sonia Hazard — who asserts that the plates existed but were not what Smith claimed them to be — notes (p. 149) Bushman to have concluded those plates to have been "Nephite relics"! Luckily, we also have excellent scholarship like Davis (2020) but there is enough of 'believer-scholarship' even in the highest rungs of academia.TrangaBellam (talk) 17:38, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Ironically I am doing the same thing right now. I was just reading this: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43200239 John-Charley Duffy's 2006 "Just How 'Scandalous' is the Golden Plates Story? Academic Discourse on the Origin of the Book of Mormon," where he looks at Mormon and non-Mormon scholarship (up to that point, which unfortunately was almost 20 years ago; I wish there was an article like this for post-2006 scholarship) and discusses Richard Bushman's (and Terryl Givens's) work, and he's pretty critical of them, calling their work apologetic (e.g. p. 157: "In light of the apologetic dimensions of their work, Bushman's and Givens' claims to have used factual language for purposes other than advocacy may look disingenuous.") I would not use Bushman or Givens for this reason.

More broadly, yes, I agree that compiling the landscape-of-21st-century-sources is a difficult task. I've added some additional sources to the Further Reading section of Mormonism and Book of Mormon. There are also some good sources already cited in both those article. I'm about to add a couple more to the Further Reading (including Duffy's 2006 paper).

Then I was thinking of doing what you're doing here and posting a list of "best sources" somewhere, maybe Talk:Mormonism, to see if people had other sources to add, or would say that some of the listed sources should be removed. Then I was going to re-write some parts of that article and Book of Mormon using the agreed-upon "best sources." I was going to do this from a "top-down" approach (starting with a sentence or two about origins in Mormonism, probably a paragraph or something in Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith, and on downwards from there), and I see you've been working from "bottom-up" (starting here with Golden plates). Perhaps we'll meet in the middle? :-) Levivich (talk) 18:06, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

@Levivich: I think discarding scholars based on unfavorable reviews won't pass muster. There are dozens of rave reviews for Bushman's scholarship and in sharp contrast, Duffy, a non-tenured Professor, is actually a nobody; he appears to have written one academic monograph in his entire career (Routledge; 2017) which has been cited about ten times till date. Btw, Duffy's MA dissertation (University of Carolina; 2006 : Faithful scholarship: The mainstreaming of Morman studies and the politics of insider discourse) might have something relevant — though it was never published and, hence, not a RS — and you might get his latest views (2024) on the world of Mormon scholarship from this book review.

I agree with your approach — so perhaps, we can curate the sources together on a t/p-subpage? And, I prefer to take the bottom-up approach, always; a total immersion in some niche in a new domain usually confers a broadsweep knowledge of the scapes as well :-) TrangaBellam (talk) 18:28, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes, I agree about unfavorable reviews not being a reason (in and of themselves) to discard a scholar, and about Duffy and his paper not being particularly prominent in this field, but I meant that we shouldn't use Bushman, not because Duffy says Bushman is apologetics, but because Bushman is apologetics. :-) I don't think we should use apologetics as sources, broadly speaking for all apologetics. And when I say "use" I mean "for statements in Wikivoice." Including their views with attribution would be fine.

Anyway, yes, let's do the t/p subpage thing (and let's include Bushman for now and then I'll have something to argue about later). Would you care to do the honors and ping me there? Levivich (talk) 18:45, 16 March 2024 (UTC)

Sources to use

• Bushman, Richard L. Joseph Smith's Gold Plates: A Cultural History. OUP. 2023.

• Fwiw, as much as Bushman is an acclaimed historian, he is also a "believer"; see Taves (2014) and Shipps (2007). So, some caution is warranted esp. when you hear this from the horse's mouth:

  I will confess I became something more than a neutral observer at one point in the book. When I came to write about the Book of Mormon, I turned into an apologist. I could not resist countering the arguments of critics about the nineteenth century sources of the Book of Mormon. I thought most of the presumed explanations were unconvincing and said so, rebutting many of the chief critical arguments point by point. That put the Book of Mormon outside of history, making it a bit of a mystery. I did not explicitly say the book had to be inspired, but the implication was certainly there. The apologists loved that chapter ...

  Making Joseph Smith an impostor may accord with our modern view of what is possible and impossible—no gold plates or angels, please—but it does not explain why he succeeded. Why did people then and now believe him? To understand their belief you have to get inside his world, in my opinion, and think of him as his followers did.
  — Bushman (2007)

• Hazard, Sonia. How Joseph Smith Encountered Printing Plates and Founded Mormonism in Religion and American Culture 31, no. 2 (2021): 137–92
• Davis, William L. Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon. UNCP. 2023.

TrangaBellam (talk) 19:49, 13 March 2024 (UTC)

• "Why did people then and now believe him?" For the same reason that they believe every charismatic cult leader. Because they are miserable or troubled, and he/she offers teachings about a supposedly better way of life. Dimadick (talk) 21:45, 13 March 2024 (UTC)