Part 4: Transcription Errors in the Caractors Transcript
Although the translator is NOT an expert in antiquities, he has carefully compared the Community of Christ document with both the artist’s ‘cleaned up’ copy and with previously published copies. He discovered a few obvious errors in the artist’s copy and he has corrected those errors on the artist’s copy while making his comparisons. Most of the artifacts he found were marks due to aging of the paper, misinterpretation of unintended ink smudges in the original, and easily overlooked, missing dots.
He also concluded that the original copyist had a few areas that were not copied quite correctly from the metal plates. There were a few areas in which the characters were incorrectly separated when they should have been combined into a single, composite character, and possibly, some areas in which the elements were unintentionally copied in a single, composite form when they should have been separated into two or more separate characters.
- Click here for details about “Copying errors“
Most of the errors were omissions of tiny dots where they should be. The translation suffers in those areas when the dots are not included for the missing or incorrectly rendered marks carry meaning which has been lost or incorrectly rendered.
Nevertheless, the translator has also concluded that the original copyist (in 1827) did a very good job in rendering the original characters from metal plates by using a quill pen and home-made ink characteristic of that used in the 1830 era.
One needs to understand the rules for reading the characters for these last two kinds of errors to be recognized and these latter types of errors were not detected in the early stages of the translation. The initial coding of characters was at an early stage of the translation process, and later studies gave new insights with what we now believe are more correct character combinations. Nevertheless, the original Caractors Code Sheet codes have been retained for historical purposes. The re-groupings of characters are treated in appropriate places in later updates on this site.
The translator is of the very strong opinion that the Community of Christ document is the original copy that was taken to Professor Charles A. Anthon of Columbia University in early 1828. BUT, even if we could discover a ‘verifiable and certifiable THE true copy,’ the copy now in possession of the Community of Christ since 1903 is so faithful to the actual original that it would have been very difficult to distinguish between them.
Thus, even if the CT is NOT the original document, it is probably one of several that might have been THE original but all of which were so close in appearance to the uninitiated eye, that the differences would have been very difficult for anyone to see.
