Welcome to another episode of Mormon Discussion Podcast. I'm your host Bill Real. What a fun day this is going to be. We're going to talk about the kinderhook plates. And this is part of a larger series. This is part three or chapter three in the book that we've mentioned in the previous two episodes. We'll get to that later. But there are approximately going to be 30 chapters in this series. Today's chapter,

or episode, is on the Kinderhook plates. And with that, we'll jump into it. In April 1843,

six small metal plates were unearthed from a burial mound near Kinderhook, Illinois. They were

covered in strange engravings and symbols. Because Joseph

Smith had already gained a reputation for translating ancient records, the plates were brought to him

for examination. Joseph examined the plates and declared that they contained ancient writings.

According to contemporary accounts, he said they recorded

the history of a man descended from Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, King of Egypt.

Now, this wasn't presented as a guess, it was presented as a translation. And for decades,

the LDS Church and its leaders portrayed the partial translation of these

kinderhook plates as legitimate. They discussed them in newspapers and periodicals, and this mattered

because Joseph's credibility rested on his ability to translate ancient languages by divine

power. If he could translate unknown characters

accurately, it supported his earlier translation claims, including the Book of Mormon and the Book of Abraham.

It also matters because we need to be able to trust LDS leaders and the church system generally

to know a true translation

from a fraudulent one. At the time, there was no way for others to independently verify his

translation, and the plates and their characters were unfamiliar. So once again, people either

believe Joseph or they didn't. But unlike the gold plates,

the kinderhook plates still existed. And unlike the book of Abraham papyri, we don't have to rely

on translation debates to understand them. Because decades later, the truth came out. In the late 19th century, one of the men

involved in discovering the plates confessed that they were, in fact, a hoax. He explained that the

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