Across the library

Did the witnesses sign their testimony?

A fair question with an unsatisfying answer, which is why it is worth setting out carefully. The document that would settle it no longer exists, the copy that survives is in one man's handwriting, and the witness who was asked about it gave three different answers.

Short version: no autograph of the witness testimonies survives. What that does and does not imply takes a little longer, and both the people who cite this as a problem and the people who wave it away tend to skip the middle.

What survives

The earliest surviving copy of both testimonies is in the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon — the copy Oliver Cowdery made by hand to carry to the printer, so that the original would not leave the family's keeping. That page is entirely in Cowdery's handwriting, and that includes all eleven names.

So the names on the oldest document we have are not signatures. They are one man's copying of a list of names, which is exactly what a fair copy made for a typesetter would look like whether the original was signed or not.

What was lost

The original manuscript would have settled it. In 1841 it was sealed into the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, and water got in. The portion containing the witness statements did not survive. Whatever was on that page — autographs, copied names, or nothing at all — is gone.

An 1881 report in the Deseret Evening News described the names on the original as having been in the witnesses' own handwriting. That is a recollection published half a century after the fact, about a document already destroyed, and it should be weighed as such.

What David Whitmer said, three times

The last surviving witness was asked directly, and this is the part that deserves to be quoted rather than characterised. In an 1878 interview with Joseph F. Smith and Orson Pratt, Whitmer first said the witnesses had signed:

Yes, we each signed his own name.

David Whitmer, 1878 interview with Joseph F. Smith and Orson Pratt, quoted in "Did the Three and Eight Witnesses place their signatures on their testimonies?", Witnesses of the Book of Mormon

Shown that every name on the manuscript was in the same hand, he revised it:

Oliver must have copied them.

David Whitmer, same interview, quoted in Witnesses of the Book of Mormon

By 1885 he had settled on a third version, and it is the one that fits the surviving document:

The witnesses did not sign the original manuscript though [they] were present and ordered Oliver Cowdry to sign for them.

David Whitmer, 1885, quoted in Witnesses of the Book of Mormon — bracketed word and spelling as transcribed

What this does and does not prove

It does mean there is no page anywhere with eleven autographs on it, and anyone who has been told otherwise has been told wrong. It also means the strongest form of the claim — eleven men signed their names — is not documented in the way that sentence implies.

It does not mean the testimonies were manufactured without the witnesses' knowledge. The men were alive, publicly identified, and in several cases hostile to Joseph Smith and to each other within a decade — and none of them is recorded as having disowned the statement printed under his name. Whitmer, who never returned to the church and had the least to lose, said so in print in the last year of his life.

Both of those things are true at once. The honest position is to hold them together rather than pick the one that suits.