Book of Mormon translation: The seer stone in the hat, dismissed then affirmed

The earlier assessment

Smith preferred the interpreters account

Under the compiler’s heading “Seer Stone Not Used in Book of Mormon Translation,” Smith wrote that “there is no authentic statement in the history of the Church which states that the use of such a stone was made in that translation.” He argued that the interpreters provided with the plates had been prepared for translation, so substituting “something evidently inferior” seemed unreasonable. He allowed, “It may have been so,” then suggested the story circulated because Joseph owned a stone he “may have used for some other purposes.”

The same passage says: “This seer stone is now in the possession of the Church.” The book was compiled by Bruce R. McConkie; this was Smith’s published judgment as an apostle and Church historian, not a First Presidency declaration. Smith became Church president in 1970.

A dated acknowledgment

1977: The hat appeared in the Ensign

Richard Lloyd Anderson’s September 1977 article printed David Whitmer’s 1887 description of Joseph placing a stone in a hat. Anderson questioned aspects of Whitmer’s account of how words appeared and were dictated, while distinguishing observation of the physical procedure from knowledge of its inner workings.

The hat was therefore not wholly absent from Church magazines before 2015. It was absent from the standard presentation: the Church’s current essay says that “for much of the 20th century, published accounts of the translation relied on sources that focused mainly on the interpreters,” and that artists and narrators worked from a “partial understanding of early Church history.”

The later presentation

2015: The stone became explicit published history

“Joseph the Seer,” written by Richard E. Turley Jr., Robin S. Jensen, and Mark Ashurst-McGee, affirmatively described the separate stone and the hat and included photographs of the brown stone. It distinguished this instrument from the two interpreters associated with the plates.

The present Gospel Topics account also distinguishes the instruments. It explains that twentieth-century published accounts emphasized the interpreters, that memory of the other stone faded, and that artists and narrators often relied on an incomplete understanding.

What changed

The status of the historical evidence

The current account explains that the term Urim and Thummim came to be applied to both the interpreters and the separate stone. That shared terminology can obscure the difference unless a source specifies the instrument.

The central comparison is concrete: an apostle and future Church president called the evidence hearsay and said no authentic statement supported it, while the Church held the stone. Later Church historians accept the stone and the hat as part of the translation history and have published the stone’s photograph.

Finding

What the record establishes

The stone-in-a-hat account is now affirmed in official Church publications. A senior apostle previously dismissed the same evidence as hearsay while noting that the stone was in the Church’s possession. A reader told that this history was invented by critics can point to both records.