This is part 2 of our discussion of the video from "Informed Saints" about SITH (the stone-in-the-hat narrative).
Here is the link to the SITH video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiAx1CVPlc0
Original in blue, my comments in red, other quotations in green.
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2:45 the other thing it was
big for was the artwork that showed up in it [the book From Darkness Unto Light]..
The Artwork
You guys [Dirkmaat and MacKay] had original art commissioned, original art of Joseph Smith translating with head and hat
2:56
uh with various different scribes. Uh really great book. Yeah. And then you know Anthony Sweat actually uh uh contacted multiple different artists.
Technically true, because he interviewed 3 artists.
And so the appendix
3:06
of the book actually has an essay that he wrote
It's a useful essay on the topic of history vs art. Another version of it is available online here:
where he where he asked artists, you know, why did you portray the translation the way that you did in this popular image?
That's simply false. The appendix refers to Sweat interviewing Del Parson, whose painting of the translation is the most often used, but the Appendix does not relate what Del had to say about it. Sweat also interviewed Walter Rane and J. Kirk Richards, neither of whom had painted the translation. Other than Del, Sweat did not interview any artists who portrayed the translation. Instead, he simply reviewed depictions of the translation found in the Ensign magazine.
And what he found was twofold.
“artists not aware”
Some of them were not totally aware of the various different sources, which you know, right, you don't expect an artist to be a historian.
This might have been a joke because Anthony Sweat, an artist, teaches Church history at BYU. But based on his essay and other work, to the extent Sweat is a historian he engages in the odd practice of promoting a narrative at the expense of teaching students the known facts of history, just like the panelists in this interview.
All Sweat and other BYU professors need to do is teach the facts, and then explain the various assumptions, inferences and theories that lead to multiple working hypotheses.
That would enable students to make fully informed decisions.
But as this panel demonstrates, the BYU professors steadfastly refuse to teach facts. Instead, they promote
3:29
You should see me draw. Um, some of them were unaware of the various sources of translation.
None of the three artists Sweat interviewed claimed to be "unaware" of SITH. To the contrary, Rane and Richards pointed out the aesthetic problems with depicting SITH.
And so they they depicted it the way that they envisioned it in their own mind.
Actually, they depicted it the way Joseph and Oliver described it, as corroborated and taught by LDS Church leaders for decades through at least the 1990s.
See the list of General Conference references here:
https://www.mobom.org/urim-and-thummim-in-lds-general-conference
In the Appendix, Anthony Sweat makes this claim: "Regarding the translation of the Book of Mormon, this becomes particularly problematic because none of the currently used Church images of the translation of the Book of Mormon are consistent with the historical record....
Let's say this is debatable regarding the Ensign art because it usually omits the Urim and Thummim and breastplate. But the art showing Joseph translating the plates is fully consistent with the historical record--just not with the Mormonism Unvailed version of history (i.e., SITH) that Sweat prefers.
All of the Ensign images are inconsistent with aspects of documented Church history of the translation process. For example, in each of the seventeen Ensign images, Joseph Smith is shown looking into open plates (not closed or wrapped or absent plates).
Having the plates open is consistent with what Joseph and Oliver (and Lucy Mack Smith and John Whitmer) said, as well as D&C 10. Not to mention common sense. Joseph explained that the Title Page was on the last leaf of the plates. The Lord told Joseph to translate the engravings on the plates of Nephi, which would not make sense if he was not even looking at the plates.
In eleven of the images, Joseph Smith has his finger on the open plates, usually in a studious pose, as though he is translating individual characters through intellectual interpretive effort, and not through revelatory means through the Urim and Thummim.
In the Appendix, Sweat included this painting by Del Parson as an illustration. As he observed, there is no indication that Joseph is using either the Urim and Thummim or the breastplate.
And certainly not the hat or a seer stone.
 |
| Del Parson's version |
But the Lord instructed Joseph to translate the engravings on the plates. (D&C 10) Joseph himself said he was "translating the characters." (JS-1832 History) He explained that he started by copying the characters and translating them. (JS-History) That is all well-established history that anyone can read, and it is directly from Joseph Smith, not from someone else decades later.
Given that historical record, it is well within artistic license to infer that at some point, Joseph was familiar enough with the characters (engravings) that he would not need to use the Urim and Thummim at all times. What he would need at all times are the plates whose engravings he was translating.
He still translated by means of the Urim and Thummim that came with the plates because that's how he learned the characters in the first place. But once he knew the characters, he would need the Urim and Thummim mainly for new characters he had not seen before.
To say that Del's painting is not "consistent with the historical record" reflects Sweat's own assumptions that contradict the historical record left by Joseph and Oliver.
Only one painting in the past forty-three years depicts Joseph Smith using the Urim and Thummim [Nov 1988 and Feb 1989].
As just discussed, this is both reasonable inference from what Joseph told us, and a reasonable artistic reluctance to depict the Urim and Thummim itself, given the vague descriptions.
Most tellingly, none of the images ever printed in the history of the Ensign (or recent Church videos) depicts the translation process of the Book of Mormon as having taken place by placing a seer stone or the Nephite interpreters in a hat."
Naturally, Sweat thinks this is a problem because he promotes SITH instead of what Joseph and Oliver taught.
Instead, Sweat says "I felt impressed that it was time to try and provide a faithful, well-executed artistic image (as many of the existing images of translating using the hat are either deliberately pejorative or devoid of much artistic merit) of the translation of the Book of Mormon that better reflected historical reality."
While Sweat claims his own artwork "better reflected historical reality," the "reality" he depicts is the SITH narrative promoted by the 1834 book Mormonism Unvailed, which Joseph and Oliver specifically and repeatedly refuted.
3:35 And which is that's a pretty natural thing to say, well, how do how do I think translation looked? And so they did it.
“expectations of the audience”
He did talk to some who were
well aware of the sources of
3:48
translation, but when push came to shove creating their image, they didn't know how they could portray that and still have the spiritual experience because it wasn't what the expectation of the audience was.
Apparently this comment refers to Walter Rane's observation that SITH "is going to look really strange to people." Rane explained that he was approached twice to portray SITH, but the commission was changed. He decided not to do it because "some things just don't work visually." The "expectations of the audience" did not come up.
The panel in the video typically consider themselves more sophisticated than ordinary Latter-day Saints who still believe what Joseph and Oliver taught, so naturally they would frame the problem as the "expectations of the audience" as the problem.
In other words, if only ignorant Latter-day Saints would get with their SITH program, they face less resistance from BYU students and others who still believe Joseph and Oliver told the truth.
So, we've been talking about how there's this disconnect between what the historical sources support about a certain event
4:07
and then how artists often
portray that being at odds with each other sometimes just by the nature of the
craft of art.
Ironically, that last sentence is a good description of the problem caused by Sweat's SITH art. That art drives a wedge between what Joseph and Oliver taught (which many Latter-day Saints till believe) and the prevailing SITH narrative published long ago in Mormonism Unvailed.
It is continually amazing how these BYU professors and other LDS intellectuals keep hammering on that wedge.
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Gary Smith's version, inserted into President Monson's talk published in the Ensign.
https://catalog.churchofjesuschrist.org/assets/26f066e5-0d4b-484c-b0c3-e114cf40490d/0/48
The artwork currently on the Church website.
https://history.churchofjesuschrist.org/content/joseph-smith-translates-the-gold-plates?lang=eng
Composites of translation artwork.
