Plates, a Seer Stone, and a Precedent Already Set

When James Strang claimed to have translated the Book of the Law of the Lord from an ancient set of plates using the Urim and Thummim, he was not introducing a new kind of religious claim into the Latter Day Saint movement. He was repeating, deliberately, the exact evidentiary shape Joseph Smith had already used to authenticate the Book of Mormon, a translation from golden plates by the same named instrument, and Strang's early followers would have recognized the pattern immediately.

Strang went further than simply echoing Smith's claim. His editions carried prefaces including affidavits from a small number of named witnesses attesting to the plates' existence, again mirroring the Book of Mormon's own witness testimonies, a structure meant to give a skeptical or wavering follower the same kind of evidentiary reassurance Smith's movement had offered from its own beginning.

The strategy makes sense given who Strang was trying to persuade. After Joseph Smith's 1844 death, Strang was competing for the loyalty of Latter Day Saints who already accepted translated ancient scripture as a live possibility within their faith, not skeptics who needed to be convinced translation from hidden plates could happen at all. Producing his own plates, translated by the same claimed method and backed by the same kind of witness testimony, was the most direct way available to make his own prophetic claim legible to an audience Smith had already prepared to receive exactly this kind of book.