One LDS author, Dan Vogel in American Apocrypha:Essays on the Book of Mormon stated: “Given the fact that the three witnesses saw a vision and that the experience of the eight witnesses seems to have been similarly visionary, there is no compelling evidence that Joseph Smith actually possessed anciently constructed plates.” Perhaps we could at most give the witnesses credit for being gullible. Jerald and Sandra Tanner have explored the possibility that Joseph Smith, with the aid of Oliver Cowdery (who had been a blacksmith when young), had made some sort of metal plates which they covered up and presented to the witnesses to touch as “proof” of Joseph Smith”‘s golden plates theory. Richard Abanes, in One Nation Under Gods: A History of the Mormon Church, demonstrates conclusively that all eleven “witness” accounts boil down to either visions or the experience of hefting a heavy object under a cloth. Biographer Remini offers a more secular explanation of the witnesses”‘ “testimony:” They can be attributed to Joseph”‘s documented ability to “mesmerize” audiences, or to the mass hysteria characteristic of other Great Awakening religious groups, or even to a conspiracy of fraud to profit from the Book of Mormon.
For more information, see The Mormon Mirage 3rd Edition: A Former Member Looks at the Mormon Church Today (Zondervan, 2009). Also available as an audiobook and as an expanded-text E-book for Nook, Kindle and other reading devices.
