Jenda said:
[SIZE=-1]Lots of people were convinced of the authenticity of the documents he "found'. My church fell for the "Joseph Smith, III blessing" and paid a large amount of money for it. That doesn't make it authentic. The book describes how he created his "authentic" documents.[/SIZE]
Normally it would be true that a lot of people claiming something to be authentic when it is not, is irrelevant. However, my point was that the, then, sitting prophet, seer, and revelator of the LDS accepted the documents as authentic. Some prophet, some seer?
But having said that I did not base my post entirely on the article I quoted but mainly on a document I had seen several years ago in,
A Comprehensive History of the Church, B.H. Roberts, BYU Press, 1965, vol. I. I mistakenly thought the picture I linked was the same one. Here as promised a scan of the "
Facsimile of the characters on the Gold plates, from which the Book or Mormon, was translated--transcribed by Joseph Smith." pg. 107, ibid. And pg. 100, ibid, which states this is "
A fragment of the transcript of the Book of Mormon characters which Joseph Smith gave to Martin Harris. . . '
As I said before we do know what, at least, some of the alleged "
reformed egyptian," on the alleged golden plates, looked like, and that from an official LDS publication. Ooops, I almost forgot that is not doctrine, it was not voted on by the general authorities, or some such excuse.
Click the thumbnail to see enlarged image of page 100.