Across the library

The Three Witnesses

Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer and Martin Harris. What they said they saw in June 1829, why all three were out of the church within nine years, and what each of them said about it at the end of his life. Every quote linked.

Three men signed the statement printed at the front of every copy of the Book of Mormon since 1830. They are the ones who said an angel showed them the plates — which makes their testimony different in kind from the Eight Witnesses, who described handling the plates and saw no angel at all.

What they signed

The experience is dated to June 1829, near the end of the translation, at the Whitmer farm in Fayette, New York. Two claims sit at the centre of the statement, and they are worth reading separately because they are doing different work.

And we declare with words of soberness, that an angel of God came down from heaven, and he brought and laid before our eyes, that we beheld and saw the plates, and the engravings thereon.

The Testimony of Three Witnesses, printed in every edition of the Book of Mormon since 1830

That is the seeing. This is the knowing, and it rests on something heard rather than something held:

And we also know that they have been translated by the gift and power of God, for his voice hath declared it unto us; wherefore we know of a surety that the work is true.

The Testimony of Three Witnesses, printed in every edition of the Book of Mormon since 1830

All three out within nine years

This is the part that makes the testimony interesting rather than merely devotional. Every one of the three broke with the church, and they did it in the space of four months.

• Martin Harris — excommunicated at Kirtland in the last week of December 1837, after being released from the high council that September.
• Oliver Cowdery — excommunicated by the high council at Far West, Missouri, on April 12, 1838.
• David Whitmer — excommunicated at Far West the following day, April 13, 1838.

Two of them came back. Cowdery was rebaptized in November 1848 at Mosquito Creek near Council Bluffs, Iowa. Harris arrived in Salt Lake City in August 1870 at eighty-seven and was rebaptized that September. Whitmer never returned, and spent the rest of his life in Richmond, Missouri, running a livery stable.

None of them denied it

Estranged from the church, in some cases bitterly, not one of the three is recorded as having taken back what he signed. Whitmer — the one who never came back, and therefore the one with the least to lose by recanting — said so in print in the last year of his life:

I will say once more to all mankind, that I have never at any time denied that testimony or any part thereof. I also testify to the world, that neither Oliver Cowdery or Martin Harris ever at any time denied their testimony. They both died reaffirming the truth of the divine authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (1887)

He also recorded what Cowdery said to him at the end. Cowdery had come back to the church in 1848 and died in March 1850 at Richmond, in the town where Whitmer lived:

Brother David, be true to your testimony to the Book of Mormon.

Oliver Cowdery's last words, as recorded by David Whitmer in An Address to All Believers in Christ (1887)

The question underneath

There is a separate question about the document itself — whether the three men ever physically signed anything, and what happened to the page they would have signed. The answer is more complicated than either side of the argument usually allows, and it has its own page here.

Each of the three also has his own page: Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris.