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< Book of Mormon | Witnesses
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The penalty for viewing the gold plates was death. This was just a way for Joseph to hide the fact that the plates really didn't exist.
Joseph Smith-History 1:42 describes the conditions under which Joseph was to handle the plates:
According to this, it was Joseph who risked destruction if he showed the plates to anyone unless explicitly commanded to do so by the Lord, not the person to whom he showed them.
Fawn Brodie claimed that Joseph told Martin Harris that God's wrath would strike him down if he examined the plates or looked at him while he was translating.
In the Eber D. Howe's anti-Mormon book, Mormonism Unvailed, Peter Ingersoll and Sophia Lewis claimed that Joseph told them that anyone who viewed the plates would perish.
Peter Ingersoll was a hostile source. Here is what he claims that Joseph said to him:
According to Peter Ingersoll, Joseph came up with the entire idea of the "golden bible" on the spur of the moment as a way to have "fun." There are so many inconsistencies between this story and the statements of numerous other witnesses that one wonders if Peter Ingersoll was the one who was having some "fun" with his audience.
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