Book of Mormon witness David Whitmer said:

"I will now give you a description of the manner in which the Book of Mormon was translated. Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine. A piece of something resembling parchment would appear, and on that appeared the writing. One character at a time would appear, and under it was the interpretation in English.”¹

Another of the three witnesses, Martin Harris, was reported as saying:

“Sentences would appear and were read by the prophet…and if correctly written, that sentence would disappear and another appear in its place, but if not written correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used.”²

Joseph Knight, an important early convert that witnessed the organization of the church in April 1830, said that after the prophet had...

“...Darkened his Eyes he would take a sentence and it would appear in Brite Roman Letters. Then he would tell the writer and he would write it. Then that would go away the next sentance would come and so on. But if it was not Spelt rite it would not go away till it was rite…”³

Seventy George Reynolds, a former secretary to President John Taylor, wrote:

“The translation was accomplished by no common method… There were no delays over obscure passages, no difficulties over the choice of words, no stoppages from the ignorance of the translator; no time was wasted in investigation or argument over the value, intent, or meaning of certain characters, and there was no reference to authorities… All was as simple as when a clerk writes from dictation. The translation of the characters appeared… sentence by sentence, and as soon as one was correctly transcribed the next would appear.”⁴

¹ An Address to All Believers in Christ, by David Whitmer, Richmond, MO, 1887, page 12.

² George Reynolds, Myth of the Manuscript Found (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor, 1883), p. 91.

³ Dean C. Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” Brigham Young University Studies 17 (Autumn 1976): 35, quoted in La Mar Peterson, Creation of the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City: Freethinker Press, 2000), pp. 95-96.

⁴ George Reynolds, Myth of the Manuscript Found (Salt Lake City: Juvenile Instructor, 1883), p. 71.