Oliver Cowdery (1806–1850)
Smith's first scribe and second witness to the plates. The only insider whose private writings suggest he understood what he was transcribing.
What is publicly known
Oliver Cowdery served as Smith’s principal scribe from 1829 to 1838. He was one of the Three Witnesses to the golden plates, signing a testimony that has been printed in every edition of the Book of Mormon.
Cowdery was excommunicated in 1838 and reconciled with the Church in 1848, the year before his death.
What is less publicly known
Cowdery’s private diary, missing from public archives between 1869 and 1987, was rediscovered in a Missouri barn in 1987 by an amateur genealogist. The diary covers 1829 to 1848.
The relevant entry, dated 14 September 1831, reads:
“Today I transcribed, from Joseph’s mouth, the forty-third revelation. I confess I do not understand what the words mean. He says it is a description of how the plates ‘work together.’ He says there are three of them, and that when set in the proper arrangement, they ‘burn without fuel, and the burning is invisible to all but the Seer.’ I have written what he has said. I do not understand it.”
The “forty-third revelation” cited by Cowdery is not the forty-third section of the Doctrine and Covenants as currently published. It is a section the committee has been unable to locate in any known LDS archive. Cowdery’s reference to “three of them” matches the committee’s separate finding of three seer-stone fragments in the Church History Collection.
The committee’s position
Cowdery knew, and tried to leave a record. He was not silenced by the same apparatus that silenced the Carthage witnesses, because he never directly published what he had written. But the diary’s disappearance from public archives for 118 years is not a coincidence.