Origin, as the Tradition Tells It

The tradition's account of how the book came to be is inseparable from the story of Joseph Smith. Latter-day Saints relate that in 1823 an angel named Moroni, in life the last of the Nephite prophets, appeared to the young Smith and told him of a record engraved on golden plates buried in a hill near his home, later called Cumorah. After four years Smith is said to have received the plates in 1827 and to have translated their "reformed Egyptian" characters "by the gift and power of God," using seer stones and the interpreters the tradition calls the Urim and Thummim, dictating to scribes, chiefly Oliver Cowdery, with Martin Harris earlier assisting.

The work was published in March 1830 by the Palmyra printer E. B. Grandin, financed by Harris. Bound into the book are two signed statements: the Testimony of Three Witnesses (Cowdery, Harris, and David Whitmer), who affirmed that an angel showed them the plates, and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses, who said they handled them. The plates themselves, the tradition holds, were returned to the angel and so are not available for examination. This paragraph reports the account as the tradition gives it; the following one takes up how scholars assess it.