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Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon George D. Smith In March 1830, Joseph Smith, a twenty-five-year-old farmer in and a faithful following that is still increasing, almost 140 western New York State, produced the Book of Mormon, years after his murder in 1844. Within nine months of the claiming it to be a record of the Hebrew ancestors of the founding of the church with six friends and family members American Indian that he had translated from "reformed on April 6, 1830, Joseph Smith took his flock of sixty to Egyptian" characters engraved on gold plates. He said that Kirtland, Ohio (near Cleveland), and gained 150 converts from these plates had been buried in about A.D. 420 on a hill near the literalistic Disciples of Christ. In two years, the number of his home and that an angel had told him where to find them. converts totaled about two thousand, and at the time of Joseph On January 4, 1833, "by commandment of God," Joseph Smith Smith's death, about twenty thousand.' The Mormon church described this work to N. E. Seaton, a Rochester, New York, (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) currently records newspaper editor, as recorded in the History of the Church:' over five million members, with adherents on every continent.5 Such growth can be attributed to several events and per- sonalities, but the Book of Mormon was so important that The Book of Mormon is a record of the forefathers of our 6 Diaries western tribes of Indians, having been found through the Joseph Smith termed it "the keystone of our religion." ministrations of an holy angel, and translated into our language and letters of early converts to the Church of Christ (as the by the gift and power of God, after having been hid up in the early Mormon church was called') point to the Book of Mor- earth for the last 1,400 years, containing the word of God mon and to the charisma of Joseph Smith as the primary which was delivered unto them.... By it we learn that our sources of the conviction that they had found the "restored western tribes of Indians are descendants from that Joseph church."8 In 1851, Mormon apostle and missionary Orson which was sold into Egypt, and that the land of America is a Pratt wrote: promised land unto them .... The Book of Mormon claims to be a divinely inspired record, written by a succession of prophets who inhabited Ancient Joseph Smith reportedly used a "seer stone" to translate America.... the Book of Mormon from the gold plates.2 Four years earlier, This book must be either true or false. If true, it is one of he had attempted to use such a stone to look for buried treas- the most important messages ever sent from God to man.... ure. At that time, he was brought to trial as a "glass-looker" If false, it is one of the most cunning, wicked, bold, deep-laid and an imposter and was convicted of disorderly conduct.3 impositions ever palmed upon the world.... In contrast to his early experience with the seer stone, the The nature of the message in the Book of Mormon is Book of Mormon brought Joseph Smith international renown such, that if true, no one can possibly be saved and reject it....9 In 1923, LDS general authority and historian B. H. George Smith is president of Roberts warned church president Heber J. Grant that "Main- Signature Books, which pub- tenance of the truth of the Book of Mormon is absolutely lishes the works of authors in essential to the integrity of the whole Mormon movement, for the Mormon community. He it is inconceivable that the Book of Mormon should be untrue has written for Dialogue and in its origin and character and the Church of Jesus Christ of Sunstone, two intellectual Mor- Latter-day Saints to be a true church.") This literalistic true- mon magazines. false dichotomy continues today as Mormon leaders assert both that "this is the only true church" and that the Book of Mormon is a literal history)' Winter 1983/84 21 The Book of Mormon Written primarily in the style of the King James Version of the Bible, the Book of Mormon relates the history of two emigrant peoples who leave the Middle East and sail to the New World: the "Jaredites" from the Tower of Babel, and later, the "Neph- ites" and the "Lamanites" from Jerusalem.''- The Jaredites came first, after the "Lord confounded the language of the people" when they displeased Him by building the Tower of Babel. The language of Jared's family was not confounded because the brother of Jared was "a man highly favored of the Lord." Instead, the Lord taught the Jaredites how to make boats that were "tight like unto a dish" and led them across the ocean "into a land which is choice above all the other lands of the earth." The Jaredites became numerous and spread out over "all the face of the land." Joseph Smith later wrote that they "covered the whole continent from sea to sea, with towns and cities."13 After many generations, they became proud and sin- ful. According to the Book of Mormon, the Jaredites destroyed one another completely, long before the second wave of Hebrew migration to the America's around 600 B.C.E. The Book of Mormon's Nephites and Lamanites were descendents of Lehi, a prophet who was warned by the Lord to flee Jerusalem before it was taken by Babylon (in 587 B.c.E). Like the earlier Jaredites, the Nephites and Lamanites sail to the New World and "cover the whole face of the land, both on the northward and on the southward, from the sea west to the Joseph Smith From an oil painting by Majors, made in Nauvoo sea east."" However, the Lamanites "dwindle in unbelief" and As a "new witness" for Christ, the Book of Mormon "God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them." united the New World with the Old. Ever since the Spanish Because of this curse they became "dark and loathsome, ... an discovered the Americas in the fifteenth century, the authority idle people, full of mischief and subtlety,"15 and eventually of the Bible had been challenged for making no mention of the exterminated the light-skinned Nephites, who were mostly American Indian—or of America. This omission seemed to hard-working, pious, and peaceful. nullify the supposedly universal salvation of Christianity as well as the reliability of the creation accounts in Genesis.16 The "In March 1830 Joseph Smith produced the Book of Book of Mormon included the American Indian within the Mormon . translated from `reformed Egyptian' gospel of Christ, and its accounts of Hebrew migrations to the characters engraved on gold plates." New World traced Indian lineage back to the creation nar- ratives. Joseph Smith had joined the battle against the Deists and other skeptics who questioned the validity of the Bible. About A.D. 421, one of the last Nephite survivors, Moroni, son of Mormon, abridger of the plates, "seals up the records of Revivalism and Egyptian Translations his people." (The Nephites were inveterate record-keepers, in- scribing their important records on gold plates.) The reasons for acceptance of the Book of Mormon may For hundreds of years, the plates lay hidden in the hill be as many as the number of converts. However, it is clear where Moroni had buried them. In 1823, Moroni, by that time that Joseph Smith's story appealed especially to frontier people an angel, appeared to Joseph Smith and told him about the who wanted clear and definite answers to their religious ques- plates. In 1827, after yearly conversations with Moroni, Joseph tions. The controversies among Protestant groups made people Smith received the plates and began the work of translation. profoundly uneasy. Unitarians rejected the trinitarian view of The most remarkable event in the Book of Mormon is a three-person God. Deists rejected the biblical portrayal of an Christ's visit to America in A.D. 34. After his resurrection and arbitrary, vindictive, and cruel God and advocated the study ascension into heaven, Jesus appears to the Nephites and re- of nature as true theology. To counter the movement of peats several of the miracles depicted in the New Testament. "Rationalism," the churches launched the Second Great Awak- He also heals the sick, retells (with variations) the Sermon on ening, a wave of revival meetings in search of spiritual conver- the Mount, picks twelve apostles—Nephi, Timothy, Jonas, sions. There were claims of divine intervention and warnings Mathoni, Mathonihah, Kumen, Kumenonhi, Jeremiah, Shem- of an imminent end to the world. William Miller announced to non, Jonas, Zedekiah, and Isaiah (3 Nephi 19:4)—administers his Seventh-Day Adventists that Jesus would visit the earth in a sacrament of bread and wine, and recites a version of the March 1843 and begin the millennium.'? In the History of the "Lord's Prayer" (3 Nephi 11-28). Church, Joseph Smith described the time immediately preced- 22 Incoiror ing his first vision as a period of "great confusion and bad feeling" with "no small stir and division amongst the people, some crying `lo, here!' and others, `lo, there!' " So intense and prolonged were the religious excitement and contention in western New York (where Joseph Smith lived) at this time, that it was called the "burned-over district."1 R The first part of the nineteenth century was dominated by romanticism, reflected in a high regard for originality and Hill Cumorah Courtesy of the Utah State Historical Society emotional sincerity.
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