Joseph Smith

 As Kurt Andersen says, the most astonishing thing about young Joe--he was a teenager in 1823, telling a tale that would have been preposterous at any age--is that anyone believed him.

It was on this night in 1823 that Joseph Smith Jr. (books by this author) claimed to have been visited by an angel named Moroni, who told him how to find golden plates that contained the text of the Book of Mormon. Joseph was visited five separate times during the night and early morning, in his family's log cabin home near Palmyra, New York. He wrote later: "While I was thus in the act of calling upon God, I discovered a light appearing in my room, which continued to increase until the room was lighter than at noonday, when immediately a personage appeared at my bedside, standing in the air, for his feet did not touch the floor. He had on a loose robe of most exquisite whiteness."

Moroni explained to Smith that there were golden plates located near his cabin that contained the true Gospel, which had been told "by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants." The angel himself was one of these ancient inhabitants, who had been brought by God to the Americas from Jerusalem, about 600 years before the birth of Jesus.

Four years after he was first visited by Moroni, in 1827, Joseph Smith was allowed to take the golden plates and translate them for the world. He called the language that they were written in "reformed Egyptian," which he claimed was the language that had evolved from Hebrew among those people whom God had brought to America.

In order to translate from this "reformed Egyptian," Smith used stones he called "seer stones." He finished his translation by 1829, then according to Smith, Moroni took the plates back. From the translation he published The Book of Mormon in March of 1830, at which point Joseph Smith Jr. was just 24 years old. A month later, Smith was starting up the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. WA