Historian of early Latter-day Saint history and religious experience who has written on the Book of Mormon witnesses and on temple ritual and Freemasonry.
Harper interprets the accounts as successive acts of remembering a real experience, shaped by present concerns, retrieval cues, audiences, and growing understanding. Differences therefore need not indicate invention, and later accounts need not be less accurate simply because they are later; his book also traces how the vision became a shared founding memory.
Harper suggests that Joseph Smith used familiar Masonic ideas and ritual forms to teach a revealed plan of salvation and covenant relationship with God. He distinguishes the forms of the ceremony from the endowment of divine power and argues that similarities and chronology alone do not establish the full causal relationship.
Harper argues that the witnesses understood their experiences as both spiritually enabled and encounters with real plates. He gives priority to their direct statements and sustained reaffirmations over conflicting hearsay, and holds that references to spiritual sight do not cancel the physical reality they described.