Book of Mormon

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In March 1830, a leather-bound octavo of nearly six hundred pages went on sale at a print shop on the main street of Palmyra, a village in western New York. The shop belonged to Egbert B. Grandin, twenty-three years old; the run was five thousand copies, the cost three thousand dollars, secured against the mortgaged farm of a neighbor named Martin Harris. The book was the Book of Mormon, and the young man who brought it to the press, Joseph Smith, presented it not as something he had written but as something he had translated — the record, he said, of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, engraved on plates of gold and rendered into English by a divine gift. Within the year a church had formed around it. The churches of the Latter Day Saint movement that descend from that founding hold the book to be scripture on a level with the Bible: a second witness, given in the New World, to the same God the Old Testament and New Testament proclaim. It takes its name from Mormon, the prophet-historian its own narrative credits with compiling the bulk of the account from older records, and engraving the abridgment onto the plates.

The Book of Mormon as first published in 1830 at Palmyra, New York. — via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

The record it claims to be

The book’s first page is a title page that frames the whole as the work of two hands across the centuries — written and abridged by Mormon out of plates handed down from a people called the Nephites, then sealed up and hidden by his son Moroni, to come forth in a later age. The 1830 edition named Smith on that page not as the author in the literary sense but as author and proprietor, the legal formula a copyright then required; the book’s own claim was always that its authorship lay with the ancient writers and that Smith was the translator.

Joseph Smith, who published the Book of Mormon as its translator in 1830; portrait from the 1840s. — Unknown artist, via Wikimedia Commons (PD-Art)

From 1982 the printed editions have carried a subtitle approved under the church president Spencer W. Kimball and announced at a general conference that October — Another Testament of Jesus Christ — placing the book by its own description beside the two Testaments of the Christian canon rather than between or beneath them.

The sacred history within

The narrative is a sweeping internal chronicle spanning roughly a thousand years, told as the layered work of successive record-keepers. It opens at Jerusalem around 600 BCE — a little over a decade, in the book’s own reckoning, before the Babylonian destruction of the city. A prophet named Lehi, warned of that coming ruin, leads his family out of the doomed city, through the wilderness of Arabia, and at last across the ocean to a promised land in the Western Hemisphere. The seam that runs through everything afterward is a family quarrel: Lehi’s elder sons, Laman and Lemuel, resent the spiritual primacy of their younger brother Nephi, and from that resentment the migrants fracture into two peoples — the Nephites, who keep the records and the covenant, and the Lamanites, cast across the narrative as their long adversaries.

What follows is a cycle of prophecy and apostasy, prosperity and collapse, narrated through fifteen named books. The earlier sequence — First and Second Nephi, then Jacob, Enos, Jarom, Omni, and the short Words of Mormon — carries the lineage forward from Lehi; the later and longer books, Mosiah, Alma, Helaman, Third and Fourth Nephi, then the Book of Mormon proper and the closing Book of Moroni, carry it to its end. Set inside this is a second and older story: the Book of Ether, the record of the Jaredites, a people the narrative places much earlier, scattered from the tower of Babel and brought to the same land, only to destroy themselves in civil war generations before Lehi’s family arrives. The recurring lesson the book presses on its reader is plain and moral — that a people prosper while righteous and are brought low when proud, the same cadence of covenant and consequence that runs through the Hebrew prophets.

Its central episode stands at the chronological middle of the gospel story rather than at the book’s center of gravity by length. After his crucifixion and resurrection, the risen Christ — the same Jesus Christ the New Testament names — descends to the Nephites gathered at a temple, shows them the wounds in his hands and side, teaches them a version of the Sermon on the Mount, ordains disciples, and institutes his church among them. For the tradition this is the book’s reason for being and the warrant of its subtitle: a witness, on a second hemisphere, that the second coming is preceded by a first that was never local to the old world alone. The chronicle then runs down toward catastrophe. Across the fourth century of the internal calendar the Nephites decline into a final war with the Lamanites; Mormon, their last great general and the historian who has been abridging the records all along, falls with his people around AD 385. His son Moroni survives, wanders, adds the closing material — including the abridged Jaredite record and a final exhortation — and buries the plates.

The account of its coming forth

For the tradition, the origin of the book is inseparable from the book. Smith taught that the same Moroni, now a resurrected and glorified angel, appeared to him as a young man and over several years directed him to the buried record in a hill near his home in upstate New York. The plates, by this account, were translated through divine instruments — described as the Urim and Thummim, two stones set in a frame, and in other accounts a seer stone — the rendering dictated to scribes, chief among them Oliver Cowdery, in a concentrated burst of work in 1829. When the translation was done the plates were, on Smith’s account, returned to the angel, and so the physical artifact cannot be brought forward for examination. This is the pivot on which every later argument turns: the central object of the claim was, by the claim’s own terms, withdrawn from the ordinary world before any disinterested eye could weigh it.

The angel Moroni appearing to Joseph Smith, as the tradition recounts the origin of the record. — Lewis A. Ramsey, published 1912, via Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

A modern reconstruction of the golden plates with the Urim and Thummim, the instruments Smith said he used to translate the record. — David A. Baird / Historical Arts and Castings, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Against that absence the tradition set human testimony. Bound into the back of the 1830 edition, and reprinted in nearly every edition since, are two signed statements. Three Witnesses — Cowdery, Harris, and David Whitmer — declared that an angel had shown them the plates and turned the leaves before their eyes, and that they had heard the voice of God affirm the translation. Eight Witnesses, drawn from the Smith and Whitmer families, declared something more tactile: that Smith had shown them the plates, that they had handled the leaves and felt the engravings, with no angel and no voice, only the metal in their hands. The two statements were calibrated to different registers — the visionary and the material — and the documentary record bears a fact often noted on every side of the dispute: all three of the principal witnesses later broke with Smith, two of them bitterly and for years, yet none is recorded as having retracted what he had signed. Whitmer, who never returned to the church, was still affirming late in his long life that he had seen the angel and heard the voice and knew the work to be true.

Two readings of one book

Here the registers part, and they have never closed the gap. Within the tradition the Book of Mormon is a genuine ancient record and a revelation, and its truth is held to be confirmed less by argument than by a spiritual witness — the book closes with a promise, attributed to Moroni, that a reader who asks God in sincerity will be answered directly, and that confirmation, rather than any external proof, is what the tradition treats as the decisive evidence. The book functions inside the faith as scripture is meant to: read in households, preached from, carried to strangers as the founding testimony of the movement, the text by which converts are made.

Historians and most scholars outside the tradition read the same book very differently — as a work of the nineteenth century, a product of Smith’s own time and the intense religious ferment of the New York frontier, engaging the live questions of that world (the fate of the American Indian, the authority of revelation, the anxieties of a fracturing Protestantism) in the sustained cadence of the King James Bible, whose phrasing and rhythm saturate the prose and whose long blocks of Isaiah it quotes. Proposed archaeological and linguistic confirmation of its New World civilizations has not been accepted by the wider academy: there is no recognized material trace of the Nephites or Lamanites as the book describes them, several of the book’s furnishings — horses, steeled weapons, wheeled chariots, certain Old World crops and animals — sit in tension with the pre-Columbian record as archaeology reconstructs it, and the Smithsonian Institution has stated plainly that it sees no direct connection between New World archaeology and the book’s subject matter. Population-genetic work tracing Indigenous American ancestry overwhelmingly to Asia has been read by the same scholars as further weight against an ancient Near Eastern migration of the kind the narrative requires; defenders within the tradition answer with a narrowed, limited-geography reading of the text. The two registers are not arguing about the same kind of object. One side weighs a record against the spade and the laboratory; the other holds that the record’s truth was always meant to be known by a means those instruments cannot reach, and that the plates were withdrawn precisely so the question would rest there. The standard biographical and literary treatments — Richard Bushman’s study of Smith and Terryl Givens’s study of the book and its reception — work the documentary ground carefully without resolving, because it cannot be resolved on documentary ground, the claim at the book’s center.

Texts and scholarship

The 1830 first edition survives, and the typeset pages and printer’s manuscript are reproduced and transcribed in the documentary edition of the Joseph Smith Papers, which presents the title page, the body of the text, and the witness statements as they were first printed at Grandin’s shop. The fullest modern critical work on the text itself is Royal Skousen’s long-running Critical Text Project, which collates the original and printer’s manuscripts against the early editions to recover the earliest recoverable wording. The standard biography that situates the translation in its documentary context is Richard L. Bushman’s Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (Knopf, 2005), the work of a historian who is himself a practicing Latter-day Saint and treats the sources without either apologetic or debunking strain; the standard study of the book as a book — its making, its internal world, and the long history of how it has been received, attacked, and defended — is Terryl L. Givens’s By the Hand of Mormon (Oxford University Press, 2002). On the witnesses, the documentary statements and the later lives of the men who signed them are gathered in the church’s own history of the witnesses, and the physical history of the first printing is reconstructed in the account of the Grandin press that produced it. The questions of archaeology, anachronism, and population genetics that divide the tradition from the wider academy are surveyed at length in the secondary literature on both sides, with no convergence in sight.

Whatever its origin, the book’s effect is not in question. From it grew one of the most significant religious movements to begin on American soil, numbering millions, and the text remains the movement’s defining scripture — read, preached from, and pressed into the hands of new readers as the founding witness of the faith.

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