Gold Plates (Church History Topics)

This is The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' own Church History Topics essay on the gold plates, part of the church's official history collection, setting out the church's account of Joseph Smith's recovery of the plates, their translation into the Book of Mormon, and the witnesses who testified to having seen them. As the custodian tradition's own statement it is the correct source for what the church itself teaches about the plates, in its own words and sequence. Its limit is that it is a movement's own devotional and historical account, not an independent examination of the plates themselves, which no outside scholar has ever had the opportunity to inspect, so a claim treating their existence or translation as independently verified historical fact rather than the church's own account needs to be corrected against that absence of outside evidence.