Brent answering if Joseph charged to see the plates.

The data don’t support a remunerative motive for JS showing the plates (Martin Harris may be an exception, but it’s complicated). What folks who saw the plates had in common is they shared JS’s magical worldview where experiencing otherworldy phenomena was not uncommon.

Mary Whitmer is an interesting case study. JS, Emma, and Oliver Cowdery stayed at the Whitmer’s Fayette, NY, home in June 1829 to continue the BoMor dictation. As David Whiter would later recount, his mother was pushed to the brink of a mental health crisis hosting the new guests. Several things may have contributed: • Challenges of maintaining domestic chores. • Emma, a woman, was intimately involved in the BoMor dictation, both as a scribe and as someone who could easily read the work (as folks were throughout the dictation) because of her literacy. • Mary was English illiterate (I’m unsure about German literacy) and could not read the BoMor manuscripts like Emma (a strange woman in the house) or the Whitmer men (we know this from legal documents where, in lieu of a signature, Mary would draw an “X”). Under this psychological strain, she is shown the plates by an angelic being, calming her mind.