The keystone of the Church of Jesus
Christ of latter-day saints is the Book
of Mormon. If it's a fraud, the rest of
our truth claims come tumbling down. We
know that and critics of our faith know
that as well so naturally, people have
been studying, testing, challenging, and
scrutinizing the Book of Mormon for
almost 200 years now trying to figure
out where this book came from. Joseph
claimed it came from ancient metal
sheets or plates with the appearance of
gold. Critics claim that based on the
descriptions of the plates we have
available, the plates couldn't possibly
have been pure gold and guess what?
Latter-day Saint scholars actually agree
with the critics on this one.
But before you go chuck your Book of
Mormon out the window, let's look into
this. A block of solid gold shaped into
the alleged dimensions of the plates
would weigh about 200 pounds. However, we
know that it wasn't a block of solid
gold, they were sheets of metal so if we
account for the air space in between
pages we're looking at anywhere from a
hundred to two hundred pounds, generously.
That's a problem because witnesses like
Martin Harris and William Smith claimed
the plates weighed about forty to sixty
pounds. Additionally, gold is a soft metal,
it's unlikely that engravings would have
lasted throughout so many centuries
without becoming distorted so witnesses
testify that the plates had a gold color
but weighed forty to sixty pounds and
the engravings were obviously still
there and not distorted . Here's where
things get interesting. In pre-columbian
Mesoamerica, the Spanish discovered that
the indigenous people used a metal alloy
called tombaga.
It was composed of gold copper and
sometimes silver. Coincidentally in the
Book of Mormon Nephi claimed to have
access to each of these metals. The
copper would have provided the metal
sheets with the hardness they needed to
preserve engravings but would not have
necessarily stripped the plates of their
golden appearance and the gold would
have saved the plates from oxidizing and
turning totally green like the copper
Statue of Liberty. Interestingly enough,
while the plates are most often
described as gold, William Smith did also
describe them as a mixture of gold and
copper. Tumbaga accounts for the color of the
golden plates as well as the hardness
but what about the weight?
Well, geologist and engineer Jerry
Grover worked out the math and found
that a set of tumbaga plates could
reasonably weigh between 53 and 58
pounds, well within the 40 to 60 pound
range our witnesses estimated. Now, did
Joseph Smith actually believed and
claimed that the plates were solid gold
or was gold just meant to describe their
color and not their metallurgical
composition. Frankly, either claim is fine
with me. If they looked like gold, the
young Joseph Smith might have assumed
they actually were gold but gold as
simply a description of color is
probably the more accurate conclusion.
What at one time might have been a heavy
left hook against the validity of the
Book of Mormon has since turned into
quite convincing evidence in favor of
the reality of the golden plates but of
course the most convincing
witness is that of the Spirit of God
which comes as a result of sincere study
and prayer about the book. For more
information on this topic, check out the
links in the description below. If you
want to actually read the Book of Mormon,
there's a link for that as well and you
just go have a great day. We'll see you
next time. I feel like I need like a
Mister Rogers sweater
for some of these.
