Don Bradley concludes
So what conclusions can we draw from all this? This is not really the conclusions we
can draw for all this, this is a shameless plug for my forth-coming book, The Lost 116 Pages:
Discovering the Book of Mormons Unknown Stories, which I had optimistically thought
would be out in September, and now I’m trying to get out in November. Anyway, shameless
plug over, so conclusions here: the text that Joseph from what Clayton calls a “portion” of
the Kinderhook plates can be derived from a single character definition – so that portion
that he is describing is probably just a single character - near the beginning of the
Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language. Substantially the same character
appears on the Kinderhook plates as one of their most prominent characters. An eyewitness
account, written on the day of the event has Joseph Smith comparing the characters from
the two sources, finding a match and enabling him to decipher at least one of the
characters.
So, a larger conclusion that we can draw is that we’ve got both the smoking-gun –
the GAEL that he uses to translate, and we’ve got an eyewitness. We know exactly how
Joseph Smith attempted to translate from the Kinderhook plates and obtain the content
that Clayton says he did. A larger conclusion, then, that we can draw is that Joseph Smith
translated from the Kinderhook plates not by revelation, but by non-revelatory means.
So, we have James D. Bales saying “only a bogus prophet translates bogus plates,” and
we’ve got Joseph Smith saying, “a prophet is only a prophet when he is acting as such.” And
when a prophet is just comparing characters in two documents, he is not “acting as such.”
Thank you.
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