A Book of Mormon Witness With Every Reason to Lie

At a Glance

• Martin Harris lost his marriage, his church standing, and any financial return on his investment — yet never denied that he saw an angel and the golden plates.

• Even his critics and enemies consistently described him as honest, upright, and respected.

• He was not a dupe, but a natural skeptic who rigorously tested Joseph Smith's claims before committing his money or his testimony.

• Over nearly fifty years, through excommunication, poverty, and sustained community ridicule, his account never changed, despite having every incentive to recant.

If you have ever wrestled with the question of whether the Book of Mormon is what it claims to be, you are in good company. Serious people have asked that question for nearly two centuries. Among the most useful tools for thinking it through is also one of the most overlooked: the testimony of Martin Harris.

Not because Martin Harris was a saint. He was stubborn, theologically restless, and by many accounts difficult to live with. His wife left him. His church excommunicated him. He spent thirty years surrounded by people who openly mocked what he believed. He died far from home, having never made a dollar from his investment in the project.

And yet he never denied what he saw.

That single fact, considered carefully and in full context, is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Book of Mormon’s authenticity.

How We Evaluate Witnesses

In a court of law, a witness’s testimony can be challenged in several specific ways. Attorneys look for

1- Bias

2- Character problems

3- Competency issues

4- Inconsistent statements

When we apply these standards to Martin Harris, something surprising happens. The case for impeachment collapses at practically every turn. More important, the collapse comes not from LDS sources, but from Martin’s own critics.

On Character: Even Enemies Agreed

The people who found Martin Harris most irritating, like competing clergymen, hostile newspaper editors, skeptical neighbors etc., still described him the same way when it came to honesty.

• “An honest and industrious farmer,” wrote Dr. John A. Clark, who had little sympathy for Mormon claims.

• “An honorable and upright man,” said E.B. Grandin, the very printer who published the Book of Mormon.

• Orlando Saunders, who knew the Harris family well, called him “an honest and worthy citizen.”

• A fourth observer described him as “a prosperous, independent farmer, strictly upright in his business dealings.”

None of these are from believers. These are critics, skeptics, and competitors — and they all reach the same conclusion: whatever else his contemporaries said of Martin Harris, he was not a liar.

His public record reinforces this. He served as a grand juror and witness in important criminal trials, as district overseer of highways in seven different years, and as a judge at agricultural fairs. As scholar Richard Lloyd Anderson observed, he was “a seasoned trader, fully aware of possible deception in a business transaction or religious experience,” whose “examination of Mormonism proceeded with the methodical care that built his material estate.”

That portrait is incompatible with the delusional crackpot his critics tried to paint. Shrewdness in business does not coexist with chronic hallucination and gullibility. Critics who try to impeach Harris do so not on grounds of dishonesty but credulity. They say he was too superstitious or too open to visions. That is an argument about competency, not character.

And it has its own serious problems.

A Skeptic, Not a Dupe

Martin Harris was, by temperament and habit, a skeptic. He did not tumble into belief in the Book of Mormon. He was dragged into it, step by reluctant step, by evidence he could not get around.

He sent his wife and daughter to the Smith home first to make independent inquiries, then interviewed them separately to see if their accounts matched. He lifted the box containing the plates, assessed the weight, and concluded the contents were consistent with gold. Even while serving as Joseph’s scribe, he secretly substituted a different stone for Joseph’s seer stone to test whether the Prophet would notice. Joseph could not translate, which Harris took as confirmation that the process was genuine.

Then, before pledging his money to print the Book of Mormon, he took copied characters from the plates to two of the leading scholars of the day: Samuel Latham Mitchell, who had spent thirty years studying Native American languages, and Charles Anthon, a Columbia professor with expertise in ancient texts. Anderson put it best: Martin Harris was “not surpassed in doubt by Thomas nor in absolute assurance by any apostle.”

This creates an almost impossible problem for critics who prefer the hallucination theory. A fraudster sophisticated enough to manufacture the deception and then consent to having copied characters scrutinized by the most learned men in America would be operating at an entirely different level of audacity. And if the scholars told Harris plainly that the characters were meaningless, what would motivate him to come home and lie about it anyway? He even printed a notice in the Palmyra newspaper that the scholars had confirmed the characters.

That is not the behavior of a deluded visionary. It reeks of conspiracy. But conspiracy and hallucination are mutually exclusive. Either Harris was sincerely deceived — in which case the evidence suggests he was not easily deceived — or he was a conscious co-conspirator, in which case the “superstitious dupe” argument evaporates. The two most popular lines of attack directly undermine each other.

The “Deer Jesus” Problem

Critics frequently reach for a story reported by Reverend John A. Clark, an Episcopal rector in Palmyra, who claimed that Harris once told a gentleman he had met the Lord Jesus Christ walking beside him in the shape of a deer. Critics have used it for nearly two centuries to brand Harris as gullible and possibly unbalanced.

But Clark did not say Harris told him this story. He heard it from an unidentified gentleman in Palmyra — making it, at best, a thirdhand anonymous account from a demonstrably hostile environment, offered by a man who had left Palmyra before Harris became a formal witness, writing twelve years after the fact.

The same problem applies to the equally popular claim that Harris told Clark he only saw the plates “with the eye of faith.” Clark does not claim to have heard this directly from Harris either. It is his report of an unnamed person’s report of what Harris may have said. The assertion that “Harris told Clark” he saw the plates only spiritually is simply not accurate to what Clark actually wrote.

Fifty Statements and a Deathbed

Over nearly half a century — through excommunication, estrangement from Joseph Smith, ridicule from Ohio neighbors, and multiple affiliations with splinter groups — Martin Harris gave more than fifty recorded statements about what he experienced. They are astonishingly consistent.

Some critics point to his wandering religious affiliations as evidence of psychological instability. But in virtually every case, the groups he associated with were splinter sects of the Latter-Day Saint movement. Even when he served briefly as a missionary for James Strang, who claimed to be Joseph Smith’s rightful successor, Harris devoted his efforts not to advocating Strang’s claims but to bearing testimony of the Book of Mormon.

He described seeing an angel. He described hearing the voice of God. He described the plates, the engravings, the experience of being shown sacred objects in open daylight. “As sure as you know that the sun is shining on us,” he told a group of skeptics late in his life, “I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of God and that he translated that book by the power of God.”

Challenged by teenagers on the street, he responded directly: “Just as plain as I see that chopping block, I saw the plates. Sooner than I would deny it, I would lay my head on that block and let you chop it off.”

Near death, when a visitor waited for a semi-conscious moment hoping to extract a recantation, Harris replied: “I know what I know. I’ve seen what I’ve seen. I’ve heard what I’ve heard. I saw the gold plates. An angel appeared to me and others. I tell you these things that you may tell others that what I have said is true. And I dare not deny it.”

He understood the stakes. He used language that distinguished between believing and knowing: “I might as well doubt my own existence as to doubt the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon.”

The Most Overlooked Argument

Critics sometimes argue that Harris’s departure from the Church undermines his testimony. Think about that logic carefully.

If Harris had helped Joseph Smith construct a fraud, the moment his relationship with Joseph Smith soured, his incentive to maintain the lie was gone. The conspiracy’s ringleader was dead. Harris had no position to protect, no profit to preserve, no friendship to maintain. He had every reason in the world to come clean.

He lived thirty years among people who wanted him to. He was surrounded in Ohio by former church leaders who had turned against Joseph Smith, by critics eager to document Mormon deception, by neighbors who would have celebrated a confession. Not one of them ever got one.

When he rejoined the Saints in Utah at age 87, it was not because he had reconsidered the evidence. “No man has ever heard me in any way deny the truth of the Book of Mormon,” he wrote to a friend in 1871, “the administration of the angel that showed me the plates, nor the organization of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints under the administration of Joseph Smith Jr.”

The evidence critics cite to undermine him is, when examined carefully, evidence for his reliability.

What This Means for Faith

None of this is proof in the mathematical sense. Faith, as the scriptures define it, is not certainty. It is confidence in things hoped for, evidence of things not fully seen.

But evidence matters. Harris was honest, he was not easily convinced, he had every incentive to recant and never did, and the theories designed to explain him away contradict each other.

If you are struggling with your faith in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, you do not need to set aside your critical faculties. You can bring them fully to bear on the historical record. What you will find, if you look carefully, is a witness who staked his money, his reputation, his marriage, and eventually his life on a claim he never abandoned.

That is worth taking seriously.

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Primary Scholarly Works

Anderson, Richard Lloyd. Investigating the Book of Mormon Witnesses. Deseret Book, 1981.

Black, Susan Easton, and Larry C. Porter. Martin Harris: Uncompromising Witness of the Book of Mormon. BYU Studies, 2018.

MacKay, Michael Hubbard, et al. "The 'Caractors' Document: New Light on an Early Transcription of the Book of Mormon Characters." Mormon Historical Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 2013, pp. 131-152.

MacKay, Michael Hubbard. "'Git Them Translated': Translating the Characters on the Gold Plates." Approaching Antiquity: Joseph Smith and the Ancient World, edited by Lincoln H. Blumell et al., Deseret Book and Religious Studies Center, Brigham Young University, 2015, pp. 83-116.

On the Anthon Affair

Kimball, Stanley B. "The Anthon Transcript: People, Primary Sources, and Problems." BYU Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, 1970, pp. 325-352.

Sloan, David E. "The Anthon Transcripts and the Translation of the Book of Mormon: Studying It Out in the Mind of Joseph Smith." Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 1996, pp. 57-81.

FARMS Staff. "Martin Harris's Visit with Charles Anthon: Collected Documents on the Anthon Transcript and 'Shorthand Egyptian.'" FARMS Preliminary Report, 1990.

Online Resources

"Appendix 2, Document 1: Characters Copied by John Whitmer, circa 1829-1831." The Joseph Smith Papers, josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/appendix-2-document-1-characters-copied-by-john-whitmer-circa-1829-1831/1.

Book of Mormon Central, bookofmormoncentral.org.

The Joseph Smith Papers Project, josephsmithpapers.org.

Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, witnessesofthebookofmormon.org.

The Contributions of Martin Harris: https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/revelations-in-context/the-contributions-of-martin-harris?lang=eng

Critical Works Consulted

Brodie, Fawn. No Man Knows My History. Knopf, 1945.

Vogel, Dan. Early Mormon Documents. 5 vols., Signature Books, 1996-2003.