The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ

According to LDS traditions, Joseph Smith, Jr. is the translator and compiler, not the author, of The Book of Mormon, but his influence is critical to understanding the development and usage of the text. Smith was born in 1805 to a New England family who then moved to western New York state—the middle of the so-called “burned-over district” that had experienced significant waves of revivalism and the appearance of new religious movements in the early 19th century. As he grew into his teenage years, Smith’s family earned its living from a modest farm and from treasure-seeking using forms of magical divination common to the period (such as divining rods). Smith himself was sympathetic to religion but uncommitted to any church or denomination.

Smith would later report that in 1820, when only 14 years old, he received a vision in the woods in which God the Father and Jesus Christ appeared before him. This was followed three years later by a visitation from the angel Moroni, who directed him to the location of the buried records of the Nephites on a hill in Palmyra, New York, where Smith discovered a book made of golden plates and a set of seer stones for the interpretation of the text. These plates reportedly included the prophet Mormon’s abridgment of the Large Plates of Nephi and another set, called the Small Plates of Nephi, along with a few other records. According to his account, Smith did not retrieve the plates at the time, but made successive visits in the following years to the spot, and in 1827, the angel Moroni finally permitted him to take the records. By this time Smith was married to his first wife, Emma Hale Smith, and they moved to her hometown of Harmony, Pennsylvania. There, together with an associate named Martin Harris, he began to compose what he referred to as his translation of the golden plates.

Working with Harris, to whom he dictated the words he was translating, Smith rapidly produced translations of the Nephite text from “reformed Egyptian” to English, though Harris was not allowed to see the source material at this time. Eventually, Harris persuaded Smith to let him take 116 pages of the translation and show it to his wife, to allay her doubts about the project. In the events that followed, those pages went missing, which led to the end of Smith’s partnership with Harris. Then in 1829, Smith began working with a new translation partner, Oliver Cowdery, and the work resumed at a much greater speed. Smith reported that he had been instructed not to retranslate the material that had been lost in the 116 pages, which belonged to the early sections of the Large Plates of Nephi, but instead to make a translation of the Small Plates, which covered the same chronological scope as the lost material. Once resumed, the entire Book of Mormon was produced in a matter of just three months, and by 1830, when Smith was still only 24 years old, it was ready for publication.

Smith claimed to have returned the plates themselves to angelic guardianship, with the result that The Book of Mormon could not be subjected to the scholarly source criticism that would be customary in such cases. Nevertheless, there were witnesses to the original sources beyond Joseph Smith. Near the end of June 1829, Joseph reports that he received a revelation that the golden plates should be shown to three witnesses who could testify to their existence: Harris, Cowdery, and another man named David Whitmer. They all reported having seen a vision of the plates in an angelic visitation, and their attestation to that effect has been printed in every subsequent edition of The Book of Mormon. Later, another set of eight witnesses (all of them family members or financial backers of Smith’s early circle) also testified to the same effect. Many of the witnesses later left the LDS movement or were excommunicated, though none ever officially recanted their testimony.

In the wake of The Book of Mormon’s publication, Joseph Smith and his associates began gaining adherents, baptizing them, and incorporating them into a church (at first designated simply as the Church of Christ). The new movement faced resistance and hostility from their neighbors nearly everywhere they went, and Smith and his community were shortly forced to remove from western New York to Kirtland, Ohio, and thence a few years later to Jackson County, Missouri. During this time, Smith continued to claim the reception of further revelations, some of which established his office as the sole leader and authoritative prophet of the movement, and some of which added new doctrinal and ethical teachings, such as those which came to be incorporated into works like The Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price. He also introduced teachings of a more controversial nature, like the practice of polygamy, in apparent contradiction to some of the earlier teachings recorded in The Book of Mormon. A few prominent members of his community resisted these teachings and the emerging power structure under Smith’s leadership, and leadership crises arose in which some of the original circle of Smith’s early supporters were excommunicated. In addition to these internal dissensions, the community was also experiencing continued hostility from the outside, which came to a climax in Smith’s death at the hands of a mob in 1844.

In the wake of Smith’s passing, there were several competing claims as to whom he intended to be his successor, and the early Mormon movement split into several significant branches: The group that would become the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints went to Utah under the leadership of Brigham Young; another group remained scattered about the Midwest and gradually coalesced around some remaining members of Joseph Smith’s family, creating the Reorganized Church of Latter Day Saints (now the Community of Christ); and other movements claiming to be the continuation of Joseph Smith’s church arose around early LDS leaders like James Strang and Sidney Rigdon. Each of these successor movements continued to hold The Book of Mormon as part of its sacred canon of scriptures.