About

This is a copy of the ‘Caractors Transcript’ which most people call the ‘Anthon Transcript.’ It was written on a 8”x3 ½ “ sheet of 19^th century paper using a home-made ink characteristic of its era of the early- to middle 1800s.

A young man named Joseph Smith Jr. claimed that he copied the characters from gold tablets or plates in late 1827. Smith gives an account of how a friend, Martin Harris, took a copy of these characters (with a translation of some of the characters) to a Professor Charles A. Anthon (‘a man celebrated for his literary attainments’) at Columbia University in New York in February or March of 1828. According to what Harris told Smith of this meeting, Anthon proclaimed the characters to be Egyptian, Chaldaic, Assyriac and Arabic and that the translation was correct.[1]

Professor Anthon later confirmed that the meeting  actually had taken place, but in three different letters, Anthon has disavowed proclaiming that the characters were ‘Reformed Egyptian’ and described them as, ‘all kinds of crooked characters disposed in columns.’[2]

[Today, we know that the characters have nothing to do with Chaldaic, Assyriac, or Arabic alphabets. Most people would deny that they have anything to do with Egyptian, but elsewhere on this site we demonstrate that there IS a relationship between the CT and Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nevertheless, we also know today that there was no human on earth that Anthon or anyone else, could have identified or translated the CT characters in 1828 because the study of Egyptology was in its infancy at that time. Champollion had not yet left on his trip to Egypt to gather the necessary documentation that he used in cracking the Egyptian hieroglyphic code when Harris and Anthon met in February or March of 1828.]

Both men were well-known (by their peers) for their honesty and integrity, but it is obvious that each observed that same meeting with quite different eyes. The three letters by Anthon were written years after the event and they are not totally consistent with each other in the details.   The Martin Harris account as quoted by Smith was second-hand information. Thus both Harris and Anthon could have made errors of perception and memory. It is also obvious that the CT page depicted above, is NOT arranged in columns (as Anthon recalled) but rather in lines. But we know of no other, even slightly different copies of these characters, in existence today, and the earliest known copy of the CT was published in New York City in a Mormon publication known as ‘The Prophet’ dated December 12, 1844.

PROVENANCE of the Caractors Transcript

The original of the copy depicted above is in the Community of Christ[1] archives in the Independence, Missouri Temple and is available for viewing by appointment or when the archivist is available to the public. This copy was obtained by the RLDS church in 1903 when the Printers Manuscript of the Book of Mormon was purchased from the heirs of the David Whitmer estate.

Whitmer was one of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon (the other two were Martin Harris and Oliver Cowdery) and the testimony of those three men has been printed in every Book of Mormon published since 1830. None of them was affiliated with the church at the time of the death of Joseph Smith Jr. Nevertheless, all three men remained true to their testimony of the Book of Mormon. Oliver Cowdery was married to one of David Whitmer’s sisters and Cowdery was living with the Whitmers for the last months of his life. David Whitmer said that shortly before Oliver Cowdery died in 1850, he told David to remain true to his testimony of the Book of Mormon. The men died almost 40 years apart and are buried in the same cemetery in Richmond, Missouri. The Whitmer’s testimony remains for all to see today, for his grave stone engraving says that “The record of the Jews and the record of the Nephites are one.“ Whitmer was confident that the CT was the actual copy that Harris took to Professor Anthon in 1828. Furthermore, Whitmer prepared a lengthy statement about his testimony and the following quote regarding the CT is taken from that testimony:

“I have in my possession the original paper containing some of the characters transcribed from one of the golden plates, which paper Martin Harris took to Professor Anthon of New York. . .[2]

Whitmer had received both the Printers Manuscript and the CT from Oliver Cowdery just before Cowdery’s death in 1850 but Whitmer was wrong when he told people that the manuscript he had received from Cowdery was the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (It was actually the Printer’s Copy that had been hand-copied by Oliver Cowdery and used by the printer for the 1830 edition. The Original Manuscript had been placed in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House during its construction in 1841.)   Thus, it is possible that Whitmer was also incorrect regarding the CT as being the same as the one Harris took to Anthon.  Nevertheless, comparison of the CT with a gold-on-black broadside (which included only the first four lines which were nearly identical with the CT) would seem to indicate that if the CT is not THE original document, that it was sufficiently close to the original that it could be considered to be a faithful, handwritten reproduction thereof.

Oliver Cowdery had been the scribe who wrote out the Book of Mormon manuscript as the words were given through Joseph Smith, Jr. As the first church historian, Oliver was responsible for safety and security of those documents and he had them in his possession until he gave them to his brother-in-law, David Whitmer , who preserved the documents until his death in 1888.  Whitmer did not follow any of the would-be leaders following Joseph Smith Jr’s death, and Whitmer’s heirs sold the documents to the RLDS church in 1903.

 

[1]   The official (legal) title of the Community of Christ is, ‘The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS).’ The shorter name was adopted in 2002 because of the long-standing confusion of non-members as to how the RLDS church was different from the Salt Lake City ‘Mormons.’ The CofChrist is now able to tell people who we ARE rather than spend time defensively stating who we ARE NOT. While the CofChrist and LDS ‘Mormon’ church have many external similarities, some very fundamental doctrines of the two churches are FAR, far apart.

[2]  David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, Mo., 1938 reprint), p. 12.

[1]   The History of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Vol 1, Heraald House, Independence, MO, p 19

[2]   IBID, p 21,