Joseph Smith, Jr. claimed that he translated the Book of Mormon from gold plates he uncovered from a hill that has since been given the name "Cumorah." It is unfortunate for those who believe his claims and archaeological science that he delivered these plates up to an angel. This means that we have no way of determining: a) whether he in fact had plates; b) what was written on those plates if they existed; and c) whether Joseph Smith provided a faithful translation of those plates.
Obviously the case for Joseph Smith's claims regarding the Book of Mormon would be much less problematic if we could at least identify ancient congeners from the western hemisphere that matched either the description of the plates or the content of the translation reasonably well. These problems are so obvious that Mormon scholars generally do not refer to them until a critic of the LDS Church raises them. When the problems are raised, most Mormon scholars go into the "it's not impossible" mode.
Because the LDS Church makes faith in Mormonism contingent upon the literal veracity of Smith's claims, it is very important to the Church that these claims not be *impossible.* For those who do not come to the question with a belief in Mormonism, however, it is enough to say that his claims are highly improbable and move on. Lacking the evidence that would truly make their case probable, however, the intrepid scholars of Mormondom focus a lot of attention on the best they can muster. This has led to some chuckle-worthy statements, like Dan Peterson's suggestion that Book of Mormon horses might have been tapirs, and the like.
Recently, the Deseret Morning News published an article on another of the more improbable supports for their case that there were Nephite gold plates in America. The BYU library has just purchased replicas of second century A.D. military diplomas from the ROMAN EMPIRE inscribed on bronze. The author of the article writes about how the BYU scholars are interested in the similarities between the technology of these plates and the description of the now absent Book of Mormon plates once possessed by Joseph Smith.
"The comparable size and thickness, the use of alloyed metal and binding rings, the fact that one part is open and another sealed, the fact that the plates bear the names of witnesses, the combination of all of these factors in a pattern, make the Roman plates relevant to the Book of Mormon plates."
The claim that the Book of Mormon had a sealed portion is also related to these diplomas:
"The ingeniously designed plates feature an open presentation of the text and a sealed interior portion, a double copy that protects the document from those who might tamper with the contents.
"We refer to such records as doubled, sealed, witnessed documents," Welch said."
For those who know little about the subject, all of this sounds very intriguing. It is true that ancient civilizations wrote things on the durable surfaces of stone, metal, and fired clay. In the eastern hemisphere there are many examples of writing on bronze, gold, and other metals, and in both hemispheres there are examples of writing on stone. Indeed, one might say that the ancients understood that something written on a hard surface might last much longer than one written on a more perishable one. This is not very interesting.
What is interesting is the use of a very specific kind of Roman legal document from the second century A.D. as evidence that people living in the western hemisphere could have written a similarly described document in the fifth century A.D.. The first problem, of course, is that as far as we know the peoples of these hemispheres did not have much contact in the first millennium A.D.. It is highly unlikely that the Romans either transmitted this knowledge to Nephites or received it from them. If the Romans picked up this specific practice from the Ancient Near East, where the Book of Mormon peoples allegedly derived from, then it would be much preferable to use the Near Eastern example, with its rings and seals, and dating to the period when Lehi and his family lived near Jerusalem, or perhaps earlier.
The real problem here, of course, is the utter lack of anything closely similar either in physical appearance or literary content to the Book of Mormon plates in the western hemisphere. In the Book of Mormon, the family of Lehi brings the technology of writing on ancient plates from ancient Palestine. They steal a record on brass plates from a distant relative and that set of plates becomes the technological model for most records mentioned in the book. In other words, based on the Book of Mormon text one would think that keeping records on metal plates was a common practice in the western hemisphere. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot of evidence in the western hemisphere pointing to the widespread ancient use of inscribed metal as a means of preserving text--not to mention the specific technologies Welch points to in the Deseret article.
In life and scholarship, we are better off placing confidence in things that are likely to be the case. Sure, every now and then the unlikely turns out to be true. But, it is usually discovered to be true through the usual methods of careful investigation in science and scholarship. Mormon scholars at BYU are, at least from a rationalist perspective, placing the cart before the horse when they assume that the Book of Mormon existed in the form Joseph Smith claimed and then use that as the basis of further investigation. Second century military diplomas from the Roman Empire are only interesting to American archaeology when that specific technology has already been established as having been used in the Americas.
It gets worse. We know, for example, that people have erroneously theorized that the technology for building American pyramids came from ancient Egypt. Here is a case in which we clearly have extant pyramids to examine, and the conclusions drawn are in favor of the independent development of the technology of pyramid building--not dependence on the Egyptians. In the case of the Book of Mormon we do not have the plates to examine, and the story of their appearance and subsequent disappearance is unlikely in the extreme. When is the last time an archaeological discovery was made by angelic intervention?
Finally, if we are going to use Joseph Smith's story as the basis for saying that ancient Americans possessed technology of a very specific type, then we need to examine that claim in the context of everything he said about ancient America to determine whether it is likely he was correct about the plates. It is not my purpose to go into the details of Book of Mormon anachronisms or ecological aberrations, but this is exactly where this kind of information would be pertinent if we pursue investigation along the lines I am proposing. If Joseph Smith is wrong about horses, elephants, and many other Book of Mormon descriptions of the ancient Americas, then the probability that he was wrong about the plates increases as the errors mount.
Without observing the proper order of investigation, certain far-flung "connections" act more as a red herring than corroboration. It was interesting to observe that both Egyptians and Ancient Americans built pyramidal structures. In the end, it did not prove that ancient Americans came from Egypt and brought a knowledge of pyramid technology with them. I would like to say that the same is the case with the Roman military diplomas and the Book of Mormon plates, but unfortunately there is no way of determining what the Mormon plates precisely were, or if they were, until we can examine them ourselves or we discover something much like them in the Americas. The LDS community does a grave disservice to its people when it trains them to indulge in such shoddy reasoning. In the end, it will not sustain them.
