Translation episodes

1. The Kinderhook plates, 1843

Documentary chain, in order

Date	Document	Class	What it says
23 Apr. 1843	Discovery near Kinderhook, Pike Co., Illinois	—	Six bell-shaped brass plates, ringed and clasped
~29 Apr. 1843	Plates arrive in Nauvoo	—	Kimball: probably brought by Joshua Moore
1 May 1843	William Clayton journal	Contemporary, one remove from JS	"President J. has translated a portion and says they contain the history of the person with whom they were found, and he was a descendant of Ham through the loins of Pharaoh, king of Egypt, and that he received his kingdom from the Ruler of heaven and earth." Includes a tracing of one plate.
2 May 1843	Charlotte Haven letter	Contemporary, hearsay via Joshua Moore, non-LDS	JS "said that the figures or writing on them was similar to that in which the Book of Mormon was written, and if Mr. Moore could leave them, he thought that by the help of revelation he would be able to translate them."
3 May 1843	Brigham Young notebook	Contemporary	Outline of a plate: "May 3—1843. I had this at Joseph Smith's house. Found near Quincy."
~3–4 May 1843	*Times and Seasons* editorial	Contemporary, institutional	"Mr. Smith has had those plates, what his opinion concerning them is, we have not yet ascertained… he purposes returning with them for translation; if so, we may be able yet to furnish our readers with it."
7 May 1843	Parley P. Pratt letter	Contemporary	Plates "contain the genealogy of one of the ancient Jaredites back to Ham the son of Noah"; 15 ft underground; cement vase; Pike County
24 June 1843	*Nauvoo Neighbor* broadside	Contemporary	Facsimiles of all twelve sides; "the contents of the plates … will be published in the 'Times and Seasons,' as soon as the translation is completed"
1855	W. P. Harris letter (pub. 1912)	Later firsthand	Bridge Whitton told Harris that he "cut and prepared the plates" and that he and Wiley "engraved them themselves"
3 & 10 Sept. 1856	Deseret News, "History of Joseph Smith"	Editorial recasting	Clayton's "President J. has translated a portion" silently changed to "I have translated a portion"
15 Jan. 1859	Millennial Star reprint	Derivative	Carries the recast text
1878, 1879	Wilbur Fugate letters	Later firsthand confession	"a HUMBUG, gotten up by Robert Wiley, Bridge Whitton and myself"; method: copper cut by Whitton, characters by beeswax impressions filled with acid; rust from nitric acid, old iron and lead; motive: "We read in Pratt's prophecy that 'Truth is yet to spring out of the earth.' We concluded to prove the prophecy by way of a joke."
1909	History of the Church vol. 5	Derivative	Recast text becomes "official"
1920	Chicago Historical Society acquires one plate	—	Via Gunther ← Richardson ← J. W. McDowell ← soldier, 2nd Iowa Reserve
1953, 1969	Engravers' affidavit; Paul Cheesman's BYU non-destructive tests	—	Mixed and inconclusive; physicists said acid-etched, non-ancient brass
1980–81	D. Lynn Johnson, Northwestern University	Destructive analysis	See below
Aug. 1981	Stanley B. Kimball, Ensign	Official Church magazine	"Kinderhook Plates Brought to Joseph Smith Appear to Be a Nineteenth-Century Hoax"
2020	*Bradley & Ashurst-McGee, Producing Ancient Scripture, ch. 17, pp. 452–523*	Faithful scholarship	Reconstructs a secular translation via the Egyptian Alphabet book

The 1980–81 analysis, with the reason for each result

SEM of the grooves — "the irregular, grainy texture characteristic of acid etching," not the lengthwise secondary grooves and metal flow a cutting tool leaves at groove intersections. → etched, not engraved.
Scanning Auger microprobe — "a clear indication of nitrogen" in groove residues, consistent with copper nitrate. → nitric acid, exactly as Fugate confessed.
X-ray fluorescence — "a true brass alloy of approximately 73 percent copper, 24 percent zinc." Ancient "brass" is bronze (copper + tin). → nineteenth-century alloy.
Ground and polished edge — "a basically 'clean' alloy," lacking the slag and inclusions expected in ancient metal.
The anti-copy control — a dent made by a nicked instrument appears twice on the plate, and the 1843 facsimile reproduced one dent as part of a character. Therefore the facsimile was made from this plate; this plate is not a modern copy made from the facsimile.

Kimball's conclusion: "the Chicago plate is indeed one of the original Kinderhook plates, which now fairly well evidences them to be faked antiquities."

Bradley & Ashurst-McGee's reconstruction (Ashurst-McGee's own public summary, Aug. 2020)

JS believed the characters resembled reformed Egyptian or the Book of Abraham papyri's Egyptian → took the plate with the largest characters in the largest heading → "began searching through the Egyptian Alphabet book for a comparable character" → "a few pages into the book, he found a character similar in shape" → the definition "did apply well to a person, providing information regarding this person's lineage, royal status, and divine blessings" → "slightly adapted the raw content of the provided definition to produce a sensible translation of the character."

Assessment. Succeeds at showing no revelation was claimed or falsified. Fails as a defense of the gift: (a) false ancient-historical content was produced from a weeks-old forgery; (b) the instrument credited is the Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar, which produced a wrong answer here — direct evidence about what it produces elsewhere; (c) the secular/prophetic distinction is retrospective and was not available to a Nauvoo Saint reading the Times and Seasons.

Score: failed as a test of the translation gift; not applicable as a test of revelation.

2. The Greek Psalter, 18 April 1842

Source: Henry Caswall, The City of the Mormons; or, Three Days at Nauvoo, in 1842 (London: J. G. F. & J. Rivington, 1842). Preface dated Liverpool, 19 June 1842.
Caswall: Anglican clergyman, professor of divinity at Kemper College, St. Louis.
Chronology: departed St. Louis by steamer Friday evening 15 April 1842; the interview was Monday 18 April 1842.
Stated purpose, his own words: "In order to test the scholarship of the prophet, I had further provided myself with an ancient Greek manuscript of the Psalter written upon parchment, and probably about six hundred years old."
The quotation is in ../quotes.md.

Weaknesses, in order of force: single source; no LDS corroboration; overt hostility (his frontispiece prays mercy on "all Jews, Turks, Infidels, and HERETICS," capitals his; he describes JS's countenance as "a curious mixture of the knave and the clown"); the eye-dialect ("it ain't Greek," "them figures is") is the standard literary marker for an ignorant rustic; his 1843 retelling in The Prophet of the Nineteenth Century differs in detail.

Strength: near-contemporary — two months, not decades.

Score: not scorable. Not used as evidence for anything in the article.

3. The Joseph Smith Translation and Adam Clarke

The claim

Haley Wilson (later Wilson-Lemmon) and Thomas A. Wayment, précis in BYU's Journal of Undergraduate Research, 16 March 2017 (site now dead; read via the Internet Archive capture of 18 Jan. 2018):

Our research has revealed that the number of direct parallels between Smith's translation and Adam Clarke's biblical commentary are simply too numerous and explicit to posit happenstance or coincidental overlap. The parallels between the two texts number into the hundreds, a number that is well beyond the limits of this paper to discuss.

Full publication: "A Recovered Resource: The Use of Adam Clarke's Bible Commentary in Joseph Smith's Bible Translation," in Producing Ancient Scripture (Univ. of Utah Press, 2020); and Wayment alone, "Joseph Smith, Adam Clarke, and the Making of a Bible Revision," Journal of Mormon History 46:3 (2020).

Marquee example — Colossians 2:20–22. JS moves "which are after the doctrines and commandments of men" from v. 22 to the end of v. 20. Clarke: "After the commandments and doctrines of men? These words should follow the 20th verse, of which they form a part." Wilson and Wayment: the change "does little to smooth out the flow… and does nothing to change the meaning, but it can be no mere coincidence that the two sources relocate a portion of the verse in precisely the same way."

The response

Kent P. Jackson, "Some Notes on Joseph Smith and Adam Clarke," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 40 (2020): 15–60.

I believe that none of the examples they provide can be traced to Clarke's commentary, and almost all of them can be explained easily by other means.

Four legs, each with a reason:

Corpus size. Jackson: they "have presented over thirty passages." The "hundreds" were never published as a list, so the claim cannot be checked at the claimed scale.
Context. Some revisions attributed to Clarke are ones JS "had made repeatedly before he arrived at the passages where they believe he got ideas from Clarke."
Non-parallels. "There is a mountain of material in Clarke that is not reflected in the Joseph Smith Translation, and there is a mountain of material in the Joseph Smith Translation that cannot be explained by reference to Clarke."
No distinctive vocabulary. The sharpest test. Clarke paraphrases 1 Cor. 15:26's "shall be destroyed" as death "shall be counter-worked, subverted, and finally overturned," and 2 Tim. 3:16 as "Every writing divinely inspired." JS uses none of it.

Jackson also documents a sourcing failure: Wayment and Wilson-Lemmon's "several later accounts" of Nathaniel Lewis pulling Clarke off a shelf reduce to one 2003 Dialogue article by Ronald V. Huggins, whose shelf detail was his own embellishment (Huggins to Jackson, 30 Oct. 2019).

Jackson is not defending a no-sources position: he proposes 2 Chron. 22:2 (Ahaziah's age) and Nehemiah 7 (the family lists) as possible printed-source influences, and notes that at Nehemiah, JS's solution "was the opposite of Adam Clarke's."

Verdict

Confident: "hundreds of parallels" is unsubstantiated as published and should not be repeated as fact.
Confident: the distinctive-vocabulary test is the right test, and Clarke's distinctive vocabulary is absent from the JST.
Confident: neither side is disinterested. Jackson had endorsed the Clarke connection in print (Largey, Pearl of Great Price Reference Companion) before examining it, and discloses this.
Not confident: Colossians 2:20–22. It is not a clarification, not a modernization, and not a change JS had been making on his own. One case is not a pattern; it is also not nothing.

Score: not scorable — a live dispute. Even the strongest form of the Wayment thesis does not disprove inspiration; D&C 88:118 tells the Saints to seek wisdom "out of the best books."

Correction to the brief

The task brief described "Kent Jackson's 2019 response in BYU Studies Quarterly." The response located and read is 2020, in Interpreter 40:15–60. No 2019 BYU Studies Quarterly response was found.

4. The Egyptian Alphabet and Grammar

Compiled roughly July–November 1835. Assigns meanings to characters, many drawn from the Joseph Smith papyri, organized by "degrees." Not re-argued here — see ../../book-of-abraham/.

Its relevance to this article is single and specific: on Bradley and Ashurst-McGee's reconstruction it is the instrument JS used on the Kinderhook plates in 1843, eight years after compilation. It was therefore still in use and still trusted as a working translation tool at the end of his life.

5. Claimed ancient-language successes

Routed to the articles where the evidence lives, to avoid duplicating three investigations:

Book of Mormon Semitic/Egyptian name etymologies (Alma, Sariah, Paanchi, Pahoran, Nahom) → ../../book-of-mormon-authorship/, ../../book-of-mormon-archaeology/. The NHM altar inscriptions from Marib are an archaeological argument, not a translation argument.
Book of Abraham parallels (Olishem, lion-couch motif, Facsimile 3 names) → ../../book-of-abraham/.
Chiasmus and Hebraisms → a literary argument, ../../book-of-mormon-authorship/.

The controlling observation: the experiment "hand Joseph Smith an unknown ancient text and check the result independently" was run three times — the Book of Abraham papyri, the Kinderhook plates, Caswall's Psalter — with no instance of independent confirmation.