Book of Mormon

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The Book of Mormon is a religious text first published in Palmyra, New York, in 1830 by Joseph Smith, and held by the churches of the Latter Day Saint movement to be scripture on a level with the Bible. Smith presented it not as his own composition but as a translation: the record, he said, of ancient inhabitants of the Americas, inscribed on golden plates and rendered into English by divine gift. The book takes its name from Mormon, the prophet- historian its narrative credits with compiling the bulk of the account.

What the text itself recounts is a sweeping sacred history. It follows families said to have left Jerusalem around 600 BCE and crossed the ocean to the New World, where their descendants — chiefly the Nephites and the Lamanites — rose, warred, and fell across a thousand years. Its central episode is a visit by the risen Christ to these peoples after his resurrection, preaching and establishing his church among them. The book thus frames itself as a second testament to the same Christ the Bible names, which is why later editions carry the subtitle “Another Testament of Jesus Christ.”

The account of its origin is, for believers, inseparable from the book. Smith taught that an angel named Moroni — the same figure who, as a mortal, had buried the plates centuries before — directed him to the record in a hill near his home, and that he translated it through divine instruments while the plates were in his keeping. Eleven associates signed statements that they had seen or handled the plates; the plates themselves, by Smith’s account, were returned to the angel and so cannot be examined.

Here the registers part sharply. Latter Day Saints hold the book to be a genuine ancient record and a revelation, its truth confirmed less by argument than by a spiritual witness promised to the reader who prays over it. Historians and most scholars outside the tradition read it instead as a nineteenth-century work — a product of Smith’s own time and religious environment, engaging the questions of frontier America in the cadence of the King James Bible. Proposed archaeological or linguistic confirmation of its New World civilizations has not been accepted by the wider academy. The dispute is old and unlikely to settle, since the claim at its heart concerns events held to lie outside the reach of ordinary evidence.

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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