This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2017, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
When I first saw the article and accompanying picture, "LDS youths urged to learn from founder Joseph Smith's struggles" (May 9), I thought I might be reading the Deseret News (or, even Ensign).
The picture, while charming, does not depict the translation of the Book of Mormon, as the caption suggests. In fact, the LDS Church's own website (lds.org/topics) contains a description of the actual process that suggests Smith used either the "interpreters," aka "Urim and Thummim" (a breastplate and a clear pair of stones bound together with a metal rim), or a seer stone (which he found as a young man and used to look for lost objects and buried treasure) for the translation process.
Smith "placed either the interpreters or seer stone in a hat, pressed his face into the hat to block out extraneous light, and read aloud the English words that appeared on the instrument." Smith's first of many wives, Emma, described Joseph "sitting with his face buried in his hat, with the stone in it, and dictating hour after hour."
Personally, I'm not certain The Tribune should even report on the speeches of LDS (or other) church leaders as if those speeches are news but, at minimum, the reporting and accompanying pictures/renderings should accurately represent church history or doctrine, regardless of whether that material is "courtesy of the LDS Church."
Perhaps the better caption would have been, "This painting inaccurately depicts the translation of the Book of Mormon."
Doug Balli
Emigration Canyon