1. 1. Grant Underwood, “The Dictation, Compilation, and Canonization of Joseph Smith’s Revelations,” in Foundational Texts of Mormonism: Examining Major Sources, edited by Mark Ashurst-McGee, Robin Scott Jensen, and Sharalyn D. Howcroft (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 107.
2. 2. James D. Tabor, “Do Historians of Religion Exclude the Supernatural?,” HuffPost, Sept. 5, 2016, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/do-historians-of-religion-exclude-the-supernatural_b_57cda5cde4b06c750ddb3815.
3. 3. Lyman E. Johnson and Mary Whitmer also offered “religious” accounts of the plates. Johnson left no firsthand account of his experience, but others heard him discuss it. Benjamin Stokely wrote: “An angel brought the Mormon Bible and laid it before him (the speaker); he therefore knows these things to be true” (cited in William Shepard and H. Michael Marquardt, Lost Apostles: Forgotten Members of Mormonism’s Original Quorum of Twelve [Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2014], 43—see Lost Apostles, 46 and 91, for similar examples). In interviews given in 1878, 1887, and 1889, David Whitmer told how he, Joseph Smith, and Oliver Cowdery met a “messenger with the plates,” as they traveled from Pennsylvania to the Whitmer home in Fayette, New York, in June 1829. Variously described as “an old man,” “one of the three Nephites” and “the angel Moroni,” this personage showed the plates to Whitmer’s mother, Mary Musselman Whitmer, who told her family of the experience but left no first-hand account. (See Lyndon W. Cook, ed., David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness [Orem, Utah: Grandin Book, 1991], 27, 215–16, 217–18.)
4. 4. Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 4. Accounts from those who claimed to have simply lifted the plates inside a container are not included in this discussion.
5. 5. “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” Saints’ Herald 26, no. 19, Oct. 1, 1879, 289–90.