The Anthon Transcript is a small piece of paper on which Joseph Smith, Jr. wrote several lines of characters. According to Smith, these characters were from the Golden Plates

Golden Plates

According to Latter Day Saint belief, the golden plates are the source from which Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon, a sacred text of the faith...

 (the ancient record from which Smith claims to have translated the Book of Mormon

Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon is a sacred text of the Latter Day Saint movement that adherents believe contains writings of ancient prophets who lived on the American continent from approximately 2600 BC to AD 421. It was first published in March 1830 by Joseph Smith, Jr...

) and represent the Reformed Egyptian

Reformed Egyptian

According to the Book of Mormon, that scripture of the Latter Day Saint movement was originally written in reformed Egyptian characters on plates of "ore" by prophets living in the Western Hemisphere from perhaps as early as 2600 BC until as late as AD 421. Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the...

 writing that was on the plates. In 1828, this paper was delivered to professor Charles Anthon

Charles Anthon

Charles Anthon was an American classical scholar.-Life:After graduating with honors at Columbia College in 1815, he began the study of law, and in 1819 was admitted to the bar, but never practiced...

, a well-known classical scholar of Columbia College, Columbia University, for an expert opinion on the authenticity of the characters and the translation. Some adherents to the Book of Mormon claim that Anthon attested to the characters' authenticity in writing to Martin Harris but then ripped up his certification after hearing the story of Joseph Smith and the plates. Critics claim that Anthon believed any idea of Reformed Egyptian was a hoax all along and that Harris was being deceived.

Believers claim that this event fulfilled a Biblical

Bible

The Bible refers to any one of the collections of the primary religious texts of Judaism and Christianity. There is no common version of the Bible, as the individual books , their contents and their order vary among denominations...

 prophecy

Prophecy

Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...

 made by Isaiah

Isaiah

Isaiah ; Greek: ', Ēsaïās ; "Yahu is salvation") was a prophet in the 8th-century BC Kingdom of Judah.Jews and Christians consider the Book of Isaiah a part of their Biblical canon; he is the first listed of the neviim akharonim, the later prophets. Many of the New Testament teachings of Jesus...

 (Isaiah 29:11-12), as Anthon said to Harris, "I cannot read a sealed book."

In 1980, Mark Hofmann

Mark Hofmann

Mark William Hofmann is an American counterfeiter, forger and convicted murderer. Widely regarded as one of the most accomplished forgers in history, Hofmann is especially noted for his creation of documents related to the history of the Latter Day Saint movement...

 created and sold a forgery of the Anthon Transcript to leaders of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which was revealed to be fraudulent when Hofmann's crimes were investigated.

Harris' account of his meeting with Anthon

In 1838, Joseph Smith related an account based on Harris' version of the meeting. Smith wrote that Anthon "stated that the translation was correct, more so than any he had before seen translated from the Egyptian. [Harris] then showed him those not yet translated, and said they were Egyptian

Egyptian language

Egyptian is the oldest known indigenous language of Egypt and a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. Written records of the Egyptian language have been dated from about 3400 BC, making it one of the oldest recorded languages known. Egyptian was spoken until the late 17th century AD in the...

, Chaldaic, Assyriac

Akkadian language

Akkadian is an extinct Semitic language that was spoken in ancient Mesopotamia. The earliest attested Semitic language, it used the cuneiform writing system derived ultimately from ancient Sumerian, an unrelated language isolate...

, and Arabic

Arabic language

Arabic is a name applied to the descendants of the Classical Arabic language of the 6th century AD, used most prominently in the Quran, the Islamic Holy Book...

; and that they were "true characters." According to the same account, Anthon provided Harris with a certificate as to the veracity of the characters but tore it up after learning the characters were copied from a book said to have been delivered by an angel.

Anthon's accounts of meeting with Harris

In 1834, Anthon stated that, "The whole story about my having pronounced the Mormonite inscription to be 'reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics' is perfectly false...I soon came to the conclusion that it was all a trick, perhaps a hoax...[Harris] requested an opinion from me in writing, which of course I declined giving." Anthon gave a second account in 1841 that contradicted his 1834 account as to whether or not he gave Harris a written opinion about the document; In his 1841 letter, Anthon said that "no one until the present time has even requested from me a statement in writing." In 1834 Anthon wrote that "[Harris] requested an opinion from me in writing, which of course I declined giving." In 1841 he wrote that, "[Harris] requested me to give him my opinion in writing about the paper which he had shown to me. I did so without hesitation, partly for the man's sake, and partly to let the individual 'behind the curtain' see that his trick was discovered. The import of what I wrote was, as far as I can now recollect, simply this, that the marks in the paper appeared to be merely an imitation of various alphabetical characters, and had, in my opinion, no meaning at all connected with them." However, in both accounts he maintained that he told Harris that he (Harris) was the victim of a fraud. Pomeroy Tucker

Pomeroy Tucker

Pomeroy Tucker was a journalist and New York politician.Born in Palmyra, New York, in 1802, Tucker served an apprenticeship as a printer in Palmyra, became a contributor to the Canandaigua Messenger, and in 1824 established the Wayne Sentinel as a Democratic organ...

, a contemporary of Harris and Joseph Smith, wrote in 1867 that all the scholars whom Harris visited "were understood to have scouted the whole pretense as too depraved for serious attention, while commiserating the applicant as the victim of fanaticism or insanity."

Caractors document

The Community of Christ

Community of Christ

The Community of Christ, known from 1872 to 2001 as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints , is an American-based international Christian church established in April 1830 that claims as its mission "to proclaim Jesus Christ and promote communities of joy, hope, love, and peace"...

 possesses the handwritten slip of paper known as the Anthon Transcript. David Whitmer

David Whitmer

David Whitmer was an early adherent of the Latter Day Saint movement who eventually became the most interviewed of the Three Witnesses to the Book of Mormon's Golden Plates.-Early life:...

, who once owned the document, stated that it was this slip of paper that Martin Harris showed to Charles Anthon, as noted above. Both Mormon apologists and critics, however, claim that it is not certain that the document is the original, since Anthon had mentioned that the characters on the slip he saw were arranged in vertical columns and ended in a "rude delineation of a circle divided into various compartments, decked with various strange marks, and evidently copied after the Aztec calendar

Aztec calendar

The Aztec calendar is the calendar system that was used by the Aztecs as well as other Pre-Columbian peoples of central Mexico. It is one of the Mesoamerican calendars, sharing the basic structure of calendars from throughout ancient Mesoamerica....

 given by Humboldt," (1834) or "a rude representation of the Mexican zodiac" (1841). The symbols on the document were published twice in 1844, after Joseph Smith's death, as characters that had been copied from the gold plates, one of them in the December 21 issue of The Prophet

The Prophet (newspaper)

The Prophet was a local Latter Day Saint newspaper in New York City, New York, USA. The first editor of the paper was William Smith, and the periodical was printed from 1844 to 1845....

.

The document is portrayed in the 2004 film The Work and the Glory

The Work and The Glory (film)

The Work and the Glory is a 2004 historical fiction drama film directed by Russell Holt. It tells the story of the fictional Steed family in the 1820s and their struggles trying to adopt the then new Mormon religion and explores their relationship with their community, with its founder, Joseph...

.