What This Catholic Apologist Isn’t Telling You About the Plates

Trent Horn is a Catholic apologist. He works for Catholic Answers. He recently published a reel on Instagram aimed at discrediting the Book of Mormon by claiming that our 531 pages of the Book of Mormon would not have been able to fit in an ancient language on the golden plates. It’s a short video, so I’m just going to play the whole thing for you, and then we’ll break it down — if you actually want to see the model of the plates he talks about, you can check out our episode on this topic on our YouTube channel. There’s some weird stuff going on.

“This is a model of the golden plates, two-thirds of which were sealed and allegedly couldn’t be opened. That means there were, at most, 40 plates, each 6 by 8 inches, that were supposed to have contained information present in the 270,000 English words of the Book of Mormon. In order to contain that information, every character on one of these plates would have to represent 80 words. But ancient hieroglyphics don’t work like that. Actual ancient metal plates, like the plates of Darius, only contain about 200 words per page. Smith’s claim that the reformed Egyptian writing on these golden plates were simply part of his own imagination.”

OK, so Trent claims that each character on the golden plates would have to represent 80 English words. The assumption here is that Trent knows how many characters were on each plate. Now, he doesn’t tell you what that number is, but he actually gives us enough information to be able to crunch the numbers and find out. If each character has to contain 80 words, and there are 270,000 words in the Book of Mormon, then we divide 270,000 by 80 to get the total number of characters he’s assuming there are on the golden plates: 3,375. He also claims there were a maximum of 40 plates. We don’t know if that is accurate or not — interestingly in a separate video where Trent debates Latter-day Saint Jacob Hansen, Trent seems open to there being 60 to 80 plates. But let’s just assume there were 40. If we divide the 3,375 characters among 40 plates, then we get about 84 characters per plate. There were characters on both sides of each plate, which means that in order for Trent’s claims to be true, he’s assuming there were only about 42 characters on each side of each plate. That is not a lot of characters, and I have no idea why he makes this assumption other than the fact that it’s the answer to life, the universe, and everything.

I thought that maybe he was just counting how many characters fit on his model of the plates, but I found his model of the plates on Etsy, and I contacted the seller, who sent me better images and informed me that there are actually about 128 characters on one side of this plate. Now, the Etsy characters are made up — we don’t know what reformed Egyptian looked like. Mormon tells us in the Book of Mormon that “none other people knoweth our language.” But in any case, even Trent’s fake plate naturally fits more than 3 times his estimate of 42 characters.

On top of that, Trent leaves out the fact that this model of the plates is not a full-scale model. It’s the ¾ scale model. This whole Instagram reel revolves around the idea that the plates were way too small, but he’s literally showing you a scaled-down model of the plates!

To read the entire article or to watch the video: Keystonelds