Joseph Smith, founding prophet of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, claimed that an angel led him to gold plates that were buried in a hill in upstate New York, on which were written the sacred record of ancient Christians who lived in the Americas centuries before. This claim, which has been fundamental to the LDS tradition ever since the faith’s organization in 1830, has served as a flashpoint for believers, critics, and scholars alike in the ensuing two centuries. The varieties through which that story has been told are the focus of this new book.

Few historians of Mormonism have garnered more academic acclaim than Richard Bushman. The author of Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Bushman is one of the preeminent explainers of Joseph Smith’s world to the world that remains transfixed by his legacies. In Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates, Bushman uses the Mormon tradition’s origin story—beloved by believers, befuddling to outsiders—to explain a spectrum of imaginative explanations, defenses, and critiques from Smith’s time until today. Chapters cover how Joseph Smith and his earliest followers framed the gold plates saga, how second- and third-generation saints incorporated it into their missionary lessons, how a growing community struggled with its veracity in the twentieth century, and even how the twenty-first-century church has depicted the story in its artwork and curriculum. This is not so much an analysis of the plates’ actuality as it is an engagement with how people have “thought” about them, whether sympathetic or critical; it is a dip into the world surrounding the plates, not the plates themselves.

Readers familiar with Rough Stone Rolling will find much overlap in the opening chapters, which cover Smith’s evolving conception of the plates. Bushman maintains a hermeneutical stance that takes Smith’s claims seriously and aims to recreate the seeker’s mental world rather than dissect them with a skeptical gaze. He emphasizes how Smith’s accounts emphasized a physical component—the plates were so real that they sprained Smith’s thumb—and depicts Smith as reacting to the story rather than creating it himself. The Mormon prophet is presented as a reluctant, almost confused chronicler whose obligation is hoisted upon him, and he is often struggling to catch up. The gold plates, in other words, are the instigative force in Smith’s life, not an element created in Smith’s own narrative. The reality of the plates and the genuineness of Smith’s retellings are taken for granted in Bushman’s meticulous, if sympathetic, recounting of the earliest tales.

Skeptical scholars will find more overlap with Bushman’s chapters that survey Smith’s earliest converts. The book emphasizes the spiritual promise offered by metaphysical claims. “The plates,” Bushman contends, “allowed people to enter for a moment into an enchanted world before returning to the mundane reality of modern existence” (53). Bushman persuasively demonstrates how central supernatural ideas were to Mormonism’s first generation and often places them within the context of other religious groups during the antebellum period. The only person to whom the book does not grant a degree of sincerity is James J. Strang, who produced his own ancient scripture translated by supernatural means through buried records: this leader of a Mormon schism was merely following a “template for prophethood” that Smith had already created (78).

Joseph Smith’s Gold Plates delves into uncharted territory and offers its most surprising arguments when it moves into the realm of art and letters, especially among the generations that never heard the plates’ story from Smith himself. For 200 years, Bushman explains, “painters and poets have sought to understand the plates in terms of their own cultures, which meant that the depictions of gold plates were constantly shifting” (98–99). Subjects include the American Arnold Friberg, who dominated the LDS art scene in the twentieth century, but also the Indonesian Hadi Pranato and Argentinian Jorge Coco Santángelp, who represent the new international community in the twenty-first. Yet even as the plates took on a more multicultural and global hue, their significance decreased in LDS official discourse, becoming mere “incidental details” in a curricular message focused on spiritual confirmation (127).

The final two chapters, focused on scientific analyses of the plates’ story as well as the global context of “found” manuscripts, are the most innovative, if a bit underdeveloped. What might a Smithsonian exhibit on the plates, Bushman asks, look like? He posits apologetic, skeptical, and contextual frameworks for the story, and then compares those narratives to those of other international sagas, like the Tibetan Buddhist terma. How one understands the plates, and to what they compare them, reveals as much about the person and their context as it does the material with which they are working. These questions should prompt further analysis from a scholarly community increasingly committed to materialist consequences of and prompting for religious belief.

In the end, after surveying two centuries of attempts to explain the plates, Bushman argues that no theory, apologist or critical, can explain where the idea of the gold plates first came from. The complexity and layers of the plates’ cultural archive defy all contexts. “The plates would feel most comfortable in the world they created for themselves,” Bushman concludes (156). Such may very well be the case. But thankfully for historians of American religion, Bushman also points to avenues of further exploration regarding how stories of the plates help us understand the many worlds of Latter-day Saint believers, critics, and observers, a heritage that shapes not only the Mormon tradition but also the many cultures in which it has existed.