The Book of Mormon: Origins, Story, Teachings and Debates

The Book of Mormon is a volume of scripture published by Joseph Smith in Palmyra, New York, in March 1830, which he said he had translated "by the gift and power of God" from golden plates shown to him by an angel. It tells the story of a family of Israelites who sailed from Jerusalem to the Americas around 600 BCE, of the nations descended from them, and of a visit by the resurrected Jesus Christ to their descendants. Latter-day Saints regard it as "another testament of Jesus Christ" alongside the Bible; most historians outside the tradition regard it as a remarkable nineteenth-century religious text, and its origin remains one of the most debated questions in American religious history.

Joseph Smith's Account of the Golden Plates§

According to Joseph Smith (1805–1844), after his first vision of God and Christ around 1820, an angel named Moroni appeared to him in his bedroom in Manchester, near Palmyra, on the night of 21–22 September 1823. The angel told him of a book written on gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of America, buried in a nearby hill, together with instruments for translating it. Smith said he visited the hill each year until he was allowed to take the plates on 22 September 1827. The hill became known as Cumorah, after the hill where the book's final battles are set.

The story belongs to the world of rural New York in the 1820s, where treasure-seeking with seer stones was a common folk practice and where Smith himself had been hired to search for buried treasure. Historians such as D. Michael Quinn and Richard Bushman have examined this background, related to the practices surveyed in Folk Magic; Latter-day Saint scholars see it as the setting in which a genuine prophetic calling emerged, and critics as evidence of a human origin for the book.

Translation, Witnesses and the 1830 Publication§

Smith dictated the text to a series of scribes, including his wife Emma, the farmer Martin Harris and, above all, the schoolteacher Oliver Cowdery. Witnesses described him placing a seer stone in a hat to exclude the light and reading off the English text, often without the plates in view; Smith himself spoke of instruments called the Urim and Thummim. In 1828 Martin Harris showed a transcript of characters to the Columbia scholar Charles Anthon, an episode Latter-day Saints connect with the sealed book of Isaiah 29:11–12. Later that year Harris lost the first 116 pages of manuscript, and most of the present text was dictated with remarkable speed between April and June 1829.

Two groups of witnesses signed testimonies printed in every edition. The Three Witnesses, Cowdery, Harris and David Whitmer, stated that an angel had shown them the plates and that a divine voice had declared the translation correct; the Eight Witnesses, members of the Whitmer and Smith families, said they had handled the plates. Several of the eleven later left the church, though none publicly retracted his testimony. Harris mortgaged his farm to pay the printer Egbert B. Grandin, and the Book of Mormon went on sale in Palmyra on 26 March 1830; the church was organised eleven days later. The story of Smith's life and church is told in The Latter-day Saints.

Structure and Narrative of the Book of Mormon§

The book contains fifteen books named after their principal authors, from 1 Nephi to Moroni. According to its own account, the prophet-historian Mormon abridged the records of his people in the fourth century CE, and his son Moroni completed and buried them. The story begins in Jerusalem around 600 BCE, when the prophet Lehi is warned to flee before the Babylonian conquest. His family crosses the ocean to a promised land, where they divide into two nations: the righteous Nephites, followers of Lehi's son Nephi, and the Lamanites, descendants of Nephi's rebellious brothers Laman and Lemuel.

Much of the narrative recounts cycles of prosperity, pride, war, repentance and preaching, with prophets such as King Benjamin, Abinadi and Alma calling the people to faith in a Christ who is yet to come. The climax is 3 Nephi, in which, after cataclysmic destruction at the time of the crucifixion, the resurrected Jesus descends among the people at a temple in the land Bountiful, teaches a sermon closely parallel to the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5, heals the sick, blesses the children and chooses twelve disciples. Latter-day Saints see this visit as fulfilling his words about "other sheep" in John 10:16. A period of peace follows, but the Nephites eventually fall back into wickedness and are destroyed by the Lamanites at Cumorah around 385 CE. The Book of Ether inserts the history of an earlier people, the Jaredites, who are said to have come to the Americas from the Tower of Babel.

Teachings and Themes§

The Book of Mormon is intensely Christ-centred: it teaches that ancient prophets knew Christ by name and that his atonement, faith, repentance, baptism and the gift of the Holy Ghost form the "doctrine of Christ". It rejects infant baptism, affirms human free agency, describes a fall that made human progress possible ("Adam fell that men might be"), and insists that God continues to speak to all nations. It presents the Americas as a promised land and the descendants of Lehi as part of the house of Israel, to be gathered in the last days. Many Latter-day Saints read Ezekiel 37:16–17, with its "stick of Joseph" joined to the "stick of Judah", as a prophecy of the Book of Mormon joined to the Bible.

The book also warns repeatedly against "secret combinations", oath-bound conspiracies such as the Gadianton robbers, which nineteenth-century readers connected with the anti-Masonic agitation of the time. Its closing chapter contains Moroni's promise, an invitation to ask God in prayer whether the book is true, which remains central to Latter-day Saint missionary work. Some passages describing a curse of dark skin on the Lamanites have been the subject of much reflection; the church now teaches that race is no measure of divine favour and has disavowed past racial explanations.

Origins Debated: Faith, History and Archaeology§

From the beginning, opponents offered natural explanations. In 1831 Alexander Campbell called the book a product of Smith's environment, echoing current controversies on baptism, Freemasonry and Calvinism. Eber D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed (1834) proposed that Sidney Rigdon had used a lost novel by Solomon Spaulding, a theory weakened when Spaulding's manuscript was found in 1884 and proved quite different. Later critics pointed to parallels with Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews (1823), which argued that Native Americans descended from the lost tribes of Israel, a popular belief of the period. Fawn Brodie's 1945 biography presented Smith as a gifted storyteller.

Mainstream archaeologists have found no evidence of Nephite or Jaredite civilisations, of the Hebrew or "reformed Egyptian" scripts the book mentions, or of certain animals, crops and metals it names in pre-Columbian America; genetic studies show that Native American ancestry derives overwhelmingly from Asia. The diverse histories of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas are treated in Mesoamerican Religion and elsewhere in this library. Latter-day Saint scholars have answered with "limited geography" models that place the events in a small region, perhaps in Mesoamerica, and with literary studies of Hebraic features such as chiasmus. Others, including some faithful members, read the book as inspired scripture without insisting on its literal historicity. Terryl Givens and Grant Hardy have shown how the book can be studied seriously as literature whatever one's view of its origin.

Editions, Translations and Influence§

The text has been revised several times: Smith made corrections in 1837 and 1840, Orson Pratt introduced the present chapters and verses in 1879, and the church published new editions in 1920, 1981 and 2013; the subtitle "Another Testament of Jesus Christ" was added in 1982. Royal Skousen's critical text project, published by Yale University Press in 2009 as The Earliest Text, reconstructs the original dictation from the surviving fragments of the original manuscript and the complete printer's manuscript, which the church acquired from the Community of Christ in 2017.

Other churches of the Restoration movement, notably the Community of Christ, also use the book, in their own editions. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints has printed it in well over a hundred languages, and reports well over 150 million copies printed. Few nineteenth-century books have been read by so many or argued over so fiercely; Mark Twain mocked it as tedious, while modern scholars treat it as a major American religious text and a key to understanding new religious movements, discussed in What Is a New Religious Movement? and in relation to the canon in The Christian Bible and Its Canon.

Frequently asked questions§

What is the Book of Mormon about?§

It recounts the history of peoples descended from an Israelite family that migrated from Jerusalem to the Americas around 600 BCE, their prophets, wars and religious life, and the visit of the resurrected Jesus Christ to them. It ends with the destruction of the Nephite nation and the burial of the record by the prophet Moroni.

Do Latter-day Saints believe the Book of Mormon replaces the Bible?§

No. Latter-day Saints accept the Bible as the word of God "as far as it is translated correctly" and read the Book of Mormon alongside it as a second witness of Jesus Christ. Both are part of the church's standard works, together with the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price.

Where are the golden plates now?§

According to Joseph Smith, he returned the plates to the angel Moroni after the translation was completed. They are therefore not available for examination, which is one reason the book's origin remains a matter of faith and debate.

Sources and further reading§

• The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text — Royal Skousen (ed.), 2009
• No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith — Fawn M. Brodie, 1945
• Early Mormonism and the Magic World View — D. Michael Quinn, 1987
• By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion — Terryl L. Givens, 2002
• Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling — Richard Lyman Bushman, 2005
• Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide — Grant Hardy, 2010
• The Book of Mormon: A Biography — Paul C. Gutjahr, 2012