DESERET NEWS ARTICLE: “Parents: Do you think Dad can translate the Hebrew Bible [when covered by a cloth]?
Kids: Yes, if he took the cloth off the book and opened it.
Parents: What if Dad left the cloth on the book. Could Dad translate it?
Kids: No, because he wouldn’t see what was inside the book!
Parents: What if God helped Dad see what was inside the book without opening the book? Could God do that?
Kids: Yes.
Parents: But is that how Dad or other scholars typically translate books? By covering them with a cloth and asking God to reveal the content inside?
Kids: No.
Parents: Exactly. But this is how Joseph Smith translated. The Book of Mormon plates were typically covered with a cloth.”
–excerpt from an article Teaching our kids about Joseph Smith’s Book of Mormon translation, by Taylor Halverson, published in the Deseret News, 7 March 2016. [source]
COMMENTARY: So you believe in a God who could reveal the contents of the gold plates to Joseph Smith even when the plates were covered by a cloth? Great. So why did Nephi have to kill Laban to retrieve the brass plates? Couldn’t God have simply used his same power to reveal the contents of the brass plates to Lehi, and then Lehi could write a new copy of that record? Maybe God hadn’t quite perfected the magic trick of seeing inside closed books in 600 BC, but he kept working on it so he was ready in the late 1820’s. Or maybe God was just lazy and didn’t want to bother revealing something that had already been written down once and didn’t need to be translated. That’s worth a man dying, right? Seems like in your fervor to defend Joseph Smith, you are willing to throw every other prophet, and even God, under the bus. But what do I know? I’m just another apostate.
