So what? The only thing that has ever been shown to
actually exist that JS supposedly 'translated' (the so-called "JS Papyri" that he purchased from a traveling salesman of antiquities) proved that he couldn't translate anything. He claimed that an Egyptian funerary text was actually the writings of Abraham "written by his own hand", and the people who can actually read it all say no. That's wildly incorrect. So now the LDS religion has had to walk back that claim, even though it is apparently present in the 'translated' text itself, to now say that "By the gift and power of God, Joseph received knowledge about the life and teachings of Abraham" in some unspecified manner via his relation to the text. Even though that text has nothing to do with Abraham.
Anyone can claim anything. That's a low bar indeed.
So what?
Sure. Here is
the recollection of Martin Harris, one of the witnesses, from an interview with Anthony Metcalf (emphasis mine):
I never saw the golden plates, only in a visionary or entranced state. I wrote a great deal of the Book of Mormon myself, as Joseph Smith translated or spelled the words out in English. Sometimes the plates would be on a table in the room in which Smith did the translating, covered over with a cloth. I was told by Smith that God would strike him dead if he attempted to look at them, and I believed it. When the time came for the three witnesses to see the plates, Joseph Smith, myself, David Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, went into the woods to pray. When they had engaged in prayer, they failed at the time to see the plates or the angel who should have been on hand to exhibit them. They all believed it was because I was not good enough, or in other words, not sufficiently sanctified. I withdrew. As soon as I had gone away, the three others saw the angel and the plates. In about three days I went into the woods to pray that I might see the plates. While praying I passed into a state of entrancement, and in that state I saw the angel and the plates. (Anthony Metcalf, Ten Years Before the Mast,n.d., microfilm copy, p. 70-71.)
Show me one that has conclusive evidence that 20+ people who claim they saw the gold plates under different circumstances are all lying. Just 1 person please.
Marin Harris ought to be good enough, since he was one of Joseph's early scribes. But if not him, how about Brigham Young, from the same page I just linked(again, emphasis mine):
Some of the witnesses of the Book of Mormon, who handled the plates and conversed with the angels of God, were afterwards left to doubt and to disbelieve that they had ever seen an angel. One of the Quorum of the Twelve — a young man full of faith and good works, prayed and the vision of his mind was opened, and the angel of God came and laid the plates before him, and he saw and handled them, and saw the angel. (Journal of Discourses 1860, 7:164)
So even though these people supposedly saw an angel, they doubt that they had. I wonder why? That seems like the type of thing that, if it had actually happened, they'd not immediately
wonder if it had actually happened. Such a thing never happened to the Theotokos St. Mary, for instance. Maybe in the Mormon case it was different because it was by "the vision of their minds" being opened at the time,
rather than actually seeing any kind of physical manifestation with their bodily eyes, just as in the case with the one of the quorum of the twelve mentioned above. If you pay close attention, Young does not say that the young man
actually saw anything with his eyes, but that the "vision of his mind was opened". The two are not the same. There's a reason why one of the more popular critical appraisals of the Mormon narrative is a book called
Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. This sort of thing was apparently common in early Mormonism.
I don't really care what you would say, because that's not a very good comparison. The writers of the Bible are not recorded as having ecstatic visionary experiences
as a vehicle for their writing of the scriptures. Certain visions
do occur in the text (e.g., St. Peter's vision on the road to Damascus), but they're not the
basis of either its authentication or its transmission, as in Mormonism.
In the "vision of your mind", perhaps, but not in reality.