The Tanners assert that Martin Harris's account of his visit with Charles Anthon is inaccurate. They cite Anthon's 1834 letter to E. D. Howe denying that he ever said that the Book of Mormon characters resembled Egyptian (p. 105). The Tanners are apparently unfamiliar with the latest research done on the Anthon episode.[1] Contrary to what the Tanners claim, there are persuasive reasons for believing that Harris and not Anthon was telling the truth.

In 1841 Anthon declared that he had never made a public statement regarding the visit previously, when in fact he already had in 1834. In 1834 he claimed that he never gave Harris a written statement, while in 1841 he admitted that he had. Aside from Anthon's own contradictory claims, there are other aspects of his story that do not make sense historically. For instance, Anthon's assertion that Harris left believing that the whole affair was a fraud is unconvincing. Whatever occurred between the two men, one thing we know: Harris returned to his home convinced that he should support the cause of the Book of Mormon. In fact, Harris had everything to lose and Anthon had everything to gain by lying about the affair. In light of Anthon's known reputation for dishonesty among his scholarly colleagues,[2] it is not difficult to believe that he lied about his identification of the characters, since being associated with the Mormons might threaten his scholarly reputation.

In 1834 E. D. Howe published a letter by W. W. Phelps in which Phelps described Harris's claim that Anthon had described the Book of Mormon characters as resembling "ancient shorthand Egyptian."[3] While Anthon later denied that the characters resembled Egyptian, it now seems clear that he probably did say just that. Anthon possessed enough information both to recognize and to make such an identification. "While the first Egyptian grammars were still in preparation, Anthon had access to enough published, preliminary data in his own personal library to enable him to assess rapidly the apparent nature of the facsimile of Book of Mormon characters."[4] In December 1826 an article in the Edinburgh Review noted that "all hieratic manuscripts . . . exhibit merely a tachygraphy [i.e., shorthand] of the hieroglyphic writing."[5] The June 1827 issue of the American Quarterly Review published an article which described Demotic as "a species of shorthand" Egyptian.[6] Several other scholarly works also discussed "shorthand" Egyptian.[7] Today we know that Anthon owned, read, and cited from these publications and would have been familiar with them at the time of Harris's visit, while the term "shorthand Egyptian" would have been completely unknown to Harris and the Mormons prior to that fateful meeting in New York City.[8] It is likely that Anthon "imagined that he could perform the same feats of translation which European classicists were then managing to accomplish at an ever increasing pace."[9] In any case, "the mention of 'shorthand Egyptian' in the Phelps letter of 1831 innocently places a seal of doom on any meaningful defense of Anthon."[10]

1. "Martin Harris' Visit with Charles Anthon: Collected Documents on the Anthon Transcript and 'Shorthand Egyptian,' " F.A.R.M.S. paper, 1990. An earlier version of this paper was published in 1984.

2. Ibid., 3, 10.

3. E. D. Howe, Mormonism Unvailed [sic] (Painesville, OH: By the Author, 1834), 273.

4. "Martin Harris' Visit with Charles Anthon," 3-4.

5. James Brown, "Hieroglyphics," Edinburgh Review 45/89 (December 1826): 145.

6. "Egyptian Hieroglyphics," American Quarterly Review 1/2 (June 1827): 450.

7. "Martin Harris's Visit with Charles Anthon," 4-5.

8. Ibid.

9. Ibid., 4; 2 Ne. 27:15-16.

10. Ibid., 9.

(Source: Jerald and Sandra Tanner, Mormonism: Shadow Or Reality? ( Matthew Roper), FARMS Review of Books, vol. 4 (1992), 211.)