LDS Perspectives Podcast

The – Don Bradley

This is not a verbatim transcript. Some grammar and wording has been modified for clarity.

Brian Hales: Hi, this is Brian Hales here with LDS Perspectives Podcast.

We are here with Don Bradley who is a professional researcher who has recently finished his master’s thesis in history from Utah State University. He has presented at many scholarly conferences and has co-authored chapters in books like Persistence of Polygamy on the topic of polygamy. He’s also co-authored a chapter in Laura Harris Hales’s A Reason for Faith, but that chapter was on the Kinderhook plates.

Now, we are here with Don to talk about the ’s lost 116 pages, which he is using for the title of his new book that will be published by Greg Kofford books. There aren’t too many LDS scholars who could talk authoritatively on three such diverse topics, but Don can do it, and we’re excited to have him here with us today.

Don, why don’t you give us a little background on what got you interested in the lost 116 pages.

Don Bradley: Sure. Hey there, Brian, my friend, it’s good to be with you.

Brian Hales: Yes, it’s great.

Don Bradley: This project has a long history. I’ve actually done research on the lost 116 pages for about 13 years, and my interest in the lost pages goes back much further, actually to when I was a kid. The lost 116 pages are what you might call a “conspicuous sacred absence,” so every Mormon primary child knows about the lost 116 pages, but nobody knows what was in them.

This has become kind of natural to us because that’s just the way that it is. But really, if you think about it, there’s nothing natural about that, right? I remember recognizing that when I was a kid before I’d gotten used to this idea, “Oh, we just don’t have these pages.” I was about 11 years old and in primary, and we had a unit on presidents of the church. When we talked about , we talked about Joseph and Martin and the loss of the

LDS Perspectives Podcast The Lost 116 Pages – Don Bradley

manuscript. I remember thinking, “We’re missing part of the Book of Mormon? What was in it?”

The Book of Mormon is so fundamental to our scripture, and it’s so fundamental to what it is to be a Latter-day Saint and to know we’re missing a substantial part of it is this bizarre, fascinating mystery.

About 13 years ago, when I started on the research, the reason why I got into it actually is just that I wanted to understand the Book of Mormon text that we have. I recognized that the later parts of the Book of Mormon are written in such a way that they often echo or refer back to earlier parts, and if you don’t know what happened earlier – if you don’t know what was written earlier – it’s hard to understand what is being said later.

I thought about that, and I thought, “Well, if we have Mormon’s abridgment – the later part – but we don’t have the earlier part, then we don’t fully understand what’s being said to us sometimes.” So I culled together all the evidence I could find from inside the Book of Mormon, from other sources, and everything that I could find written and published on the subject, which wasn’t much – we’re talking 15 to 20 pages of scholarship over nearly 200 years. That’s how I got started.

Brian Hales: Almost nothing has been written on the lost 116 pages, and you are writing a book. People are just excited about it, so how do you come up with enough information to create an actual book. How long is this book going to be?

[Jokes] Is it going to be a pamphlet?

Don Bradley: I get that question. I have people say, “Isn’t that going to be a really short book?” Actually, no; it’s going to be surprisingly long – it’s surprising to me, in fact, how long it’s going to be.

We’ve got multiple kinds of evidence for what was in the lost 116 pages. It might be natural to think that we don’t have much evidence, but we’ve actually got a good deal. Some of that evidence is in the Book of Mormon text that we already have.

Broadly, there are these two kinds of evidence: there’s the internal evidence in the available text of the Book of Mormon – or what scholars call the “extant” text – and then there’s external evidence where we’ve got statements or other sources outside of the available text of the Book of Mormon.

Internal evidence would be things like how the small plates of Nephi – from 1 Nephi through Omni or Words of Mormon – cover the same period

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as the lost pages. Even though the small plates are rather light on history, they give us at least a thumbnail sketch of what was in the lost 116 pages.

Then you’ve also got echoes or flashbacks, if you will, later in the Book of Mormon text that are flashing back to an earlier narrative that we don’t have. A great example of this would be in Mosiah 11. King Noah, it says, built a tower on this hill that was north of the land Shilom. It says that when he built this tower, it was on the same hill that the children of Nephi had used as a resort – or a place of refuge – at the time they fled out of the land.

Now what in the world is that talking about? You’re supposed to know what’s it’s talking about. You remember, don’t you, Brian,that the children of Nephi fled out of the land?

Brian Hales: No, I don’t.

Don Bradley: You don’t because it’s not in the Book of Mormon text that we have. You’re supposed to know it, though, which means it was in the Book of Mormon text; it was in the lost pages.

So that, even though it’s about a missing story, gives us a clue – multiple clues, actually – about that story. Then we can combine that with evidence actually from the small plates – from Omni – and get a better picture of what that story is that it’s talking about. There are multiple flashbacks like that in the Book of Mormon text.

Then you’ve got external evidence. In Joseph Smith’s earliest revelations, some of them also have allusions back to the lost pages. The most obvious of those is in section 10 of the where it actually says to Joseph Smith explicitly, “You’ll remember that it was said in what you translated before, that the plates of Nephi had a more extensive account of these things referring to the large plates.”

We know there that the lost pages talked about how the large plates had a more extensive account. The lost pages were apparently an abridgement from the large plates. There are other clues also that are a little more subtle but identifiable in those very early revelations where it’s referring back to something – narratives that had come before that we don’t have.

The most significant type of external evidence—there are a few others— is direct statements. The only one of these that’s been very widely known is by apostle Franklin D. Richards, who left an account that when he was in Nauvoo, he heard the prophet Joseph Smith explaining to someone how the Book of Mormon could be the stick of Ephraim. His explanation was that it said in the lost pages that although Lehi was a descendent of Manasseh, Ishmael was a descendent of Ephraim.

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There are other sources like that that give much more significant details than that. Sometimes they’re extra details about narratives that we already have and sometimes whole narratives that we don’t have – and we’ll talk about a couple of those sources later.

Brian Hales: You’ve compiled information from the small plates, which would be 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon, then there are flashbacks in the rest of the Book of Mormon, external sources from the revelations, and then other external sources that we’re going to talk about. That’s exciting!

Don Bradley: So on that question, Brian, about what it was that got me interested in the lost 116 pages, I have one more note on that. The lost 116 pages are actually the earliest LDS scripture. They’re the earliest scripture given to Joseph Smith in this dispensation. The earliest scripture after the lost pages is section 3 of the Doctrine and Covenants, given in summer of 1828. That’s given in response to the loss of the 116 pages.

The 116 pages were before that. They were the foundational scripture, if you will, of the and they’re gone. That’s another thing that’s really intrigued me: wanting to understand what was in this earliest, first foundational scripture of the Restoration.

Brian Hales: Okay, let’s just shift for a minute to the history. Tell us about how the pages came to be lost.

Don Bradley: There’s a narrative that’s been handed down about that where we have details, particularly from Joseph Smith himself. Martin wanted to take the pages, but he was put under covenant – well, let me back up. He asked three times. The first time, his request was declined; the second time, Joseph again took it to the Lord and the Lord said no; the third time, there was a provisional yes. The yes was “if you will make a covenant that you’ll only show the pages to these five people.” The five people were all members of Martin Harris’s family.

Now there is kind of a deeper question that’s not answered by the narrative that’s been handed down but that we can nonetheless piece together. That question is “Why was Martin so pushy? Why is he pestering God over and over?” “No, no, really; let me take these pages.” He was very insistent, right?

There’s no source that lays it out for us and says, “Hey, this is why Martin Harris was so insistent on taking those pages,” but if we look at the chronology of what was happening, we can infer it. This is maybe a good example of the sort of method that I’m using in analyzing the history of the lost pages and the history in the lost pages – if you will, the narrative.

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Joseph says that Martin Harris was there in Harmony taking dictation for him as he’s translating the book of Lehi from about April 12—June 14 of 1828. Something that we know about Martin is that he’s a farmer; he’s quite a good farmer, and he’s a prosperous farmer. Something that we know about that time is that there was very unusual weather that year. It was unseasonably warm, actually, so the planting season came early.

The planting season that year in upstate New York was from about mid- April until about mid-June. Notice that timeframe: Joseph said Martin was down in Pennsylvania with him taking dictation from about April 12— June 14. Guess who missed the entire planting season on his own farm in order to take dictation for that manuscript? Martin.

Another clue comes the Palmyra paper, the Wayne Sentinel, in May of that year – so between those two points: during that April 12—June 14 timeframe that Martin is in Pennsylvania. On May 8, in Palmyra, according to the paper, Martin Harris’s daughter – not his wife, Lucy, his daughter Lucy Harris Jr. – got married in Palmyra.

Guess who wasn’t at his own daughter’s wedding? He could not go home empty-handed. I think there’s plenty of room for sympathy with Martin here if you can imagine him missing the entire planting season on his farm – and that was his livelihood, right? And his own daughter’s wedding, then going home and saying, “Oh, Lucy, if you could see this manuscript, then you would know why I missed the planting season and our daughter’s wedding.”

No, he had to have something to show for all of that – and that’s why he’s just so persistent, so insistent on taking that manuscript.

Brian Hales: It makes us a little more sympathetic to Martin’s position when we understand some of the backstory there.

Martin gets the manuscript down in Palmyra now in the Harris home, and he shows it to the five people. Then what happens?

Don Bradley: Then he keeps showing it to other people.

Martin doesn’t have a lot to say about this. I think he’s kind of embarrassed about the whole thing and doesn’t really want to feel that he’s to blame for the manuscript’s loss. Joseph Smith tells us in his history that a “particular friend” of Martin’s came by who had maybe a special interest in this manuscript, and Martin felt like he just had to show this guy. He showed it to him, then once he’d sort of broken through that barrier – sort of gone beyond his covenant – then he just kind of kept on going. He showed a lot of people.

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Joseph clearly thinks that this is the reason that the manuscript got lost: because Martin had broken his covenant, and possibly also because – I think that part of what Joseph was thinking is that one of the people that Martin had showed this to was actually involved in the theft and would have known where the manuscript was.

It had been locked in a bureau and if Martin is fishing that out for guests as they’re coming in, they would’ve known where the manuscript was. They would’ve known things about the manuscript and maybe had an interest in taking it.

Brian Hales: What’s the timeline? Doesn’t he arrive in Palmyra – you said June 14 of 1828?

Don Bradley: Joseph says that he leaves Harmony around June 14, which is the day before Joseph and Emma’s first child is born, so he’s apparently benchmarking it to that date. It takes about four days to travel by stagecoach to Palmyra …

He probably gets back home somewhere around June 18. The manuscript is gone by sometime in early July. Somewhere around, I think, July 7, there’s a series of deeds that Martin is making to other members of the family: his wife and his son-in-law whom early on he appears to think had been involved in the theft. There’s a kind of property settlement going on as he’s separating, actually, from his wife.

Clearly somewhere within that three weeks after he arrives back in Palmyra, the manuscript is irretrievably gone.

Brian Hales: Okay, now for the next question: there’s several different rumors about what happened to it. I think the most popular is one that came from , who said that Lucy took it while Martin was asleep and burned it.

Don Bradley: Yeah.

Brian Hales: Then there are others saying that it went to a doctor who was actually quoting it to some of his patients.

What can you tell us and what’s your thought?

Don Bradley: It’d be awesome if my doctor were quoting this to me. You may want to take that as a professional tip.

We don’t know what happened to the manuscript and people who say for sure that they do know are fooling themselves. We don’t know. Maybe we’ll figure it out.

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About this narrative that Lucy took it and burned it: as I mentioned, Martin Harris early on did think that his wife, Lucy, had taken the manuscript. Interestingly, Martin never thought that she destroyed it. When he thought early on that she had taken it, he consistently thought that she had given it to someone else – and he thought that independent of Doctrine and Covenants section 10, because he actually was skeptical about D&C 10 because D&C 10 referred to him as a “wicked man,” and he understandably didn’t like that.

Martin, like I said, early on thinks that his wife took it and gave it to someone else. After a few years, he stops thinking that it was her and the reason why comes to us from a much later journal in Idaho, where Martin Harris’s son – Marin Harris Jr. – went and spoke at a church meeting and told the people there that his father had originally suspected his wife, Lucy, of taking the manuscript, but then she died – she died quite young; she died at 40, I think in 1836 – and when she was on her deathbed, she absolutely denied having anything to do with the manuscript theft or knowing anything about what had happened to the manuscript.

Now Lucy Harris was a devout Quaker. One of the strongest prohibitions for Quakers is on lying. They’re supposed to be absolutely honest, so Lucy Harris’s deathbed testimony apparently convinced Martin that she had nothing to do with the theft.

The idea that she took the manuscript and burned it traces to 1851, I think. It’s somewhere in the 1850s – I’ve got all of this information at home. A friend of mine, Marie Thatcher, has helped me to take the 40-some odd sources that I have about the manuscript theft and arrange them in chronological order. When you do that, you can see some patterns in how the story of the theft changes, and how it evolves over time.

In the 1850s, there’s this first person (Tucker) who raises the idea that maybe Lucy burned it, but what he says is, “Either she hid it or she took it and gave it to someone else, or she took it and burned it.” He clearly doesn’t know which of those it is, and he’s just trying to exhaustively lay out the possibilities.

Other people start building on that and start saying, “She burned it,” with greater confidence. In fact, the further that you get from the theft – the further in time you get from it – the more confident people are that it was Lucy Harris and that she burned it.

As a historian, that’s the exact opposite of the pattern I would like to see, right? I’d be more persuaded that it was Lucy Harris and that she burned it if the closer you got to the event, the more you heard people telling that story. Instead, it’s just the opposite: the further in time you get from the event, the more that’s the story.

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Brian Hales: You’re saying it may not have been burned and that it might be rediscovered?

Don Bradley: I sure hope so. I would think that after 189 years, if it were still out there, it would have surfaced. On the other hand, I do have record of people saying long after the theft that they knew where the manuscript was. I’m trying to follow up on that now, and see where it could’ve gone. It would be the biggest find ever in Mormon history and one of the biggest finds ever in religious history if that turned up, so I definitely hold out hope that it’s out there.

One person who believed that it would surface was Joseph Smith Sr. He gave an interview in 1830 in which he said to the interviewer that that manuscript would someday come forth. I don’t know if that was just his opinion, if he’s getting that from his son Joseph Jr. or what, but I hope it’s out there.

Brian Hales: Has anybody tried to forge the 116 pages?

Don Bradley: Oh yeah. The most famous forger in Mormon history – and actually one of the most famous and successful forgers in all of history – is Mark Hoffman. Actually, that is the project that he was working on right at the end of his notorious forging career. That’s the one that ultimately brought the whole house of cards crashing down.

This is sort of the Holy Grail of Mormon forgeries, if you could forge the lost 116 pages. Hoffman went out to California and claimed that he had found someone out there – I think it was California – who was a descendent of one of the residents of Palmyra who had this manuscript and he took what he claimed were “notes” from the manuscript. I’ve actually got photographs of Mark Hoffman’s notes from what is supposedly the 116 pages.

I was really interested in this because I thought it was quite possible that Hoffman had been clever enough to read some of the clues that are there in the extant Book of Mormon text or some of the other clues that we have and sort of piece together a little bit of what was in it. I thought that that would be fascinating; that if Hoffman were able to do that, then maybe I’d have to take a close look at his forgery to see what other clues that he picked up.

He didn’t pick up anything. It was nothing. His excerpts from the supposed lost 116 pages are nothing like what it was actually supposed to be, so whatever his skill might have been with working with paper and handwriting and so on, he wasn’t a good reader of the text.

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I think what’s going to happen is that more and more clues will be found. I confidently expect that as we go on, there will be more clues that people will identify that I’ve overlooked in the extant text and that other clues will surface.

This has happened a little bit already to me, but I’m greatly hoping that once I publish my book, I will be contacted by people who will say, “You know, my great-great-grandpa’s journal has this thing where he went and talked to Martin Harris, and Martin Harris told him something about the lost 116 pages.” I’m sure hoping that stuff is out there and that more of that will start to emerge as things are published about the lost 116 pages.

There’s going to be enough information still out there that I don’t think anyone could forge the lost pages without ultimately getting caught.

Brian Hales: That’s remarkable.

The lost pages have been called “The Book of Lehi.” Who called it that? Where did that name come from?

Don Bradley: In 1830 when the Book of Mormon was first about to go to press, Joseph Smith wrote a preface to it that was only included in that edition. The reason that he did that is because if you were to go straight from the title page of the Book of Mormon to the first part of the actual, subsequent Book of Mormon text, you’d go from a title page that says, “The Book of Mormon, written by the hand of Mormon, etc.” to “I, Nephi” – and that’s a jarring disconnect.

The reader understands now that there’s an introduction that explains all of that for a new reader, and Latter-day Saints already know that you’ve got the small plates up front there. However, Joseph had to solve the problem of “How do you explain to a new reader of the book –” and everybody at this point that read it was a new reader—“How do you explain why it’s ‘the Book of Mormon,’ but that this part is written by Nephi?”

Joseph put this preface in that explains about the manuscript loss. In that explanation, he refers to the manuscript as “the Book of Lehi.” There’s a lot of confusion that has arisen because of the use of that term for the lost manuscript. The biggest confusion is that people think that it was written by Lehi and it’s just about Lehi.

There are a couple of things that show us that neither of those is the case. First, in the preface to the 1830 Book of Mormon, Joseph Smith says that the lost pages (or Book of Lehi) was an abridgement made by Mormon, so the Book of Lehi is named “the Book of Lehi” by Mormon, and it’s a text

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narrated to us by Mormon; it’s not by Lehi. Second, it covers a much, much bigger time period than just the period covered by Lehi’s life.

Since the small plates are a replacement for the 116 pages, we can tell about how big the time period is covered by the book of Lehi – the lost pages – by looking at how much the small plates cover. The small plates cover about the first 450 years of Nephite history. That’s a whole lot more than just Lehi’s life.

I don’t know fully why – I have some ideas – that was referred to as the Book of Lehi, but the take-home, really, is to understand that it’s not written by Lehi; it’s written by Mormon, and it’s not just about Lehi. It starts with Lehi, but it goes all the way up to the early reign of 450 years later.

Brian Hales: Could there have been other books in that, like the or the book of somebody between Lehi and Mosiah, if we had actually had the 116 pages in front of us?

Don Bradley: I strongly suspect that Joseph Smith actually used the term “the Book of Lehi” because there was a Book of Lehi; that that was the very first book in the lost manuscript because that first book would have been about Lehi, but then it was followed by other individual books. I don’t think that the whole manuscript would have been one giant “Book of Lehi.”

In fact, we know that it wasn’t because the earliest manuscript that we have of the first part of the Book of Mosiah shows that our Mosiah chapter 1 was originally numbered chapter 3, and there was no named “book of Mosiah” in there. had to go in and add the name “the book of Mosiah” and change the Roman numeral III to Roman numeral I to renumber.

Why would he have had to do that? Because the original title and chapters I and II of the Book of Mosiah were missing; they were part of the lost pages, so we know that it was not all one big giant Book of Lehi. We know that at the very least, it had chapters of our “Book of Mosiah.” There may have been an earlier book that was a “Book of Mosiah” from Mosiah I. I suspect that there was and that there were multiple, individual books like that, just like we have in the extant part of Mormon’s abridgement.

Brian Hales: Now we always talk about 116 pages …

Don Bradley: Right.

Brian Hales: Who counted those pages? How secure are we in that number?

Don Bradley: I think we’re not very secure in that number at all. The number does come to us from a good source,

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Brian Hales: Who is that source?

Don Bradley: That source is Joseph Smith. and it’s from the 1830 preface – so why question that if it’s coming from Joseph Smith?

There are a few reasons to think that Joseph Smith is trying to make the preface as simple as humanly possible. I mentioned his use of the term “Book of Lehi” – and he also said that the Book of Lehi was translated from the plates of Lehi – so he seems to be trying to avoid having to explain that there were two sets of plates called “the plates of Nephi.” At the time, there was no term, “the small plates of Nephi” or “the large plates of Nephi.” Those terms are not in the Book of Mormon.

Instead of having to explain in the preface, “There are the plates of the Nephi and then there are the other plates of Nephi,” he refers to the subset of the large plates that covered Lehi, I think, as “the plates of Lehi.”

The preface is written when the Book of Mormon is starting to go to the press, and it’s one of the very first things that’s going to be typeset. Joseph doesn’t have a lot of time to come up with this preface to explain things, so again, I think he’s oversimplifying. So again, 116 pages just happens to be the length of the small plates that replaces the lost manuscript in the printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

What it looks like is that Joseph probably doesn’t know how many pages were in the lost manuscript. It probably wasn’t paginated. He’s trying to give a rough estimate of the length without knowing how long it was. How is he going to do that? He looks at the replacement for the lost manuscript and says, “It’s probably about as long as its replacement,” and gives it the number of 116 pages, just like that manuscript.

There are other reasons to think that that number is mistaken. One of those reasons comes from Joseph himself. As I mentioned earlier, Joseph tells us that Martin took dictation on the lost manuscript – or what would become the lost manuscript – from about April 12 to about June 14 of 1828. In the following year, in 1829, to translate 116 pages took Joseph about 2.5 weeks – that’s about how long it took him to do the small plates.

If it took him and Martin two months in 1828 to do 116 pages, they’re going very, very slow. In fact, they’re going even slower than that because Martin wasn’t the first scribe to assist Joseph with that manuscript. Emma was his first scribe, then two of her brothers, Alva and Reuben Hale, helped. Then apparently Samuel Harrison Smith, Joseph’s brother, helped.

Martin was the fifth scribe to work on that manuscript. Now the others probably did only small amounts, but still – if Martin worked on it for two

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months and four other scribes had worked on it before, they didn’t just come up with 116 pages in that time. At least, it seems very unlikely.

Another reason to believe that the manuscript would have been longer than 116 pages is to look at the length of time that the manuscript covered. The lost manuscript covered a full half of Mormon’s abridgement, Mormon’s abridgement meaning the text that he’s abridging all the way from Lehi down to the time of Ammaron, who told him about the plates in the year 320. That’s 600 years from Lehi to Christ, then 320 more years. That’s 920 years that Mormon covers in his abridgement.

About 450 of that – so almost exactly half – he had covered in the lost manuscript. The second half of Mormon’s abridgement is much longer than 116 pages. Why would the first half be so short?

The last piece of evidence is less inferential and more direct. We’ve actually got an account from Martin Harris’s brother with whom he apparently talked about the lost 116 pages, because this brother knew narratives about some of the content of the lost pages. That brother is Emer Harris.

Emer Harris was, I think, a pioneer of 1847. He came out to Utah. He’s actually familiar to Latter-day Saints of today indirectly since he’s the ancestor of Dallin Harris Oaks, which is what the “H” stands for. Anyway, that’s just to tell you who Emer Harris is.

Emer Harris, speaking at a stake conference in Utah on April 6, 1856, talked about the Book of Mormon manuscript and the theft, and he says that before the theft, his brother Martin scribed for “near-200 pages of the manuscript.” Emer was well aware of the 116 number because he’d served a mission with Martin, actually, where he was distributing many of those 5000 original copies of the Book of Mormon printed in 1830, and every single one of them had the number “116 pages” in it. If Emer Harris thought that the number his brother had recorded was nearly 200, then he had some information that was different than the 116 pages number.

I think Martin might have actually had a better count of the number of pages than Joseph did, and the reason is that Martin was the scribe and Martin was the person who probably purchased the paper and would have known what quantity of paper he had purchased and how much of it they had left. My suspicion is that he purchased 200 pages of paper, and they had nearly filled that all up, and that’s why he told his brother that he had written nearly 200 pages of the manuscript.

Brian Hales: When you talk about the 116 pages of the printer’s manuscript covering the same period, is that front and back? Are we talking 232 sides? Or are we just talking 116 sides of half that number?

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Don Bradley: 116 sides, presumably; about 52 sheets.

It could be – and this may be where you’re going – that the 116 pages would be more accurately 116 sheets. That seems more likely to be about the length of the lost manuscript. If Joseph is not deriving the number from the length of the small plates in the printer’s manuscript, he may be conflating pages with sheets, and perhaps the book was around 232 pages, or 116 sheets.

In any case, it really appears that it was much bigger than what we have thought. If it was about that length, it would be about half the length of the present Book of Mormon. That’s how much we would have lost – about half of that length, so about a third of the total Book of Mormon.

Brian Hales: Okay, Don. Let’s talk more about what you’ve discovered about the content of the 116 pages. Some scholars have compared Lehi as he left Jerusalem to Moses when he left Egypt.

Don Bradley: Yeah.

Brian Hales: Are you finding anything in your research that would support a parallel there?

Don Bradley: Yeah, very much so. There’s definitely a lot that’s in just the available text of the Book of Mormon that supports a parallel between Lehi and Moses.

Lehi, at the beginning of his prophetic career, sees a pillar of fire – that’s familiar from Moses’s Exodus. He goes on an initial three-day journey toward the Red Sea – and that’s initially what Moses had asked Pharaoh for – just to be able to travel out three days. He’s led by God to a “promised land” – he calls it that, “a land of promise.” That’s the same terminology that we have in the biblical Exodus. There’s been quite a bit of scholarship written that looks at those details in the extant text and sees Lehi as a kind of Moses figure.

Brian Hales: But you find in the 116 pages that there was probably more elaboration or discussion about Lehi in that role?

Don Bradley: Yes, there was.

One of our best sources for the content of the lost 116 pages is an interview that Joseph Smith Sr. did in early 1830 with a Palmyra resident named Fayette Lapham. At the time that this interview was done, here’s what was going on: the Book of Mormon was still at the Grandin Press, but rumors about it were flying everywhere. If you were in Palmyra or anywhere around it, you were hearing all about the “Gold ,” as people called it.

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Fayette Lapham and his brother-in-law had heard about the “gold Bible,” but they couldn’t get a copy yet of the Book of Mormon. They went to the Smith home in Manchester. Joseph Jr. was down at Harmony taking care of his farm at that point, so Fayette Lapham and his brother-in-law talked to Joseph Smith Sr. He gave them first a story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon with a lot of detail. Some of what he says is clearly garbled; we can see what the other accounts say and how what Fayette Lapham said kind of misconstrued what he was told.

There are lot of things that he says that we can verify from other sources – inside sources who knew detail – but these are inside sources that weren’t published until long after Fayette Lapham had published his own interview with Joseph Smith Sr., so he couldn’t have gotten them from these other sources.

A good example of this would be that scholars had wondered for a long time whether after losing the manuscript, Joseph went back chronologically and started the new translation work that he was doing with 1 Nephi, then replaced the lost 116 pages first and went on from there; or if he just picked up where he left off early in the book of Mosiah and went from there to the end, then went back and filled the hole with the small plates?

Scholarly examination of the Book of Mormon manuscripts and other research in the last 30 years has shown what Joseph did: he picked up where he had left off. It turns out that there were two 19th-century sources that tell us this. One of them is in, I think, 1896. Joseph Smith’s sister Katharine says that the angel – the messenger, actually – told Joseph to pick up where he left off and then go from there. The other source is Fayette Lapham who 25 years earlier says the same thing. He says that Joseph had resumed the translation where he had left off.

Scholars didn’t figure this out until the 90s – the 1990s, I should say – and Fayette Lapham is saying it in 1870. He clearly has inside information.

Brian Hales: Okay, Don, you just mentioned Fayette Lapham. Who is this guy?

Don Bradley: First of all, I didn’t discover this one. This is not a well-known source, but it’s a known source. Mark Ashurst-McGee is a friend of mine who’s with the Joseph Smith Papers, and he’s done a lot of work on Fayette Lapham’s interview with Joseph Smith Sr. He actually had suggested that Fayette Lapham may have received information about the lost pages from Joseph Sr., and so I’ve built on what Mark had originally suggested.

I don’t know a great deal about Fayette Lapham’s personal life. He was a Palmyra businessman. He was, I believe, just in his 20s at the time of the interview. He went with his brother-in-law Jacob Ramsdell, his wife’s

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brother, apparently just out of curiosity. Like I said, he was hearing the rumors about the Book of Mormon, but he couldn’t get his hands on it yet – it wasn’t available yet. Curiosity drove him to go to the Smith home and find out for himself what he could.

He didn’t publish his interview account until much later – 40 years later. Mark Ashurst-McGee has suggested to me that he thinks that Fayette Lapham took notes at the time of his interview, and I concur. He clearly does get some things garbled, but there’s too much that he gets right to not have either a supernatural memory or some kind of contemporary notes that he’s using.

Brian Hales: Has this source been published? Is this in a journal somewhere?

Don Bradley: It is in Dan Vogel’s Early Mormon Documents series, and it’s also possible to find it on the internet. You’d need to look in the right place, I guess.

You had asked about Moses earlier – these Moses connections – Fayette Lapham’s interview account gets to some of those new parallels between Lehi and Moses that are not in the extant Book of Mormon text.

After Joseph Smith Sr. tells him the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon, he tells him the story of the Book of Mormon – the story in the Book of Mormon, the narrative. He starts out with basically the familiar narrative: there’s this prophet, he’s warned by God, he travels out three days into the wilderness toward the Red Sea, he’s commanded to send his son back. Lapham only remembers one son, not all of the sons. He doesn’t remember any names, by the way. He apparently never read the Book of Mormon, which is an important point. He remembers narrative.

So this prophet sends his son back. The son tries to get this record, but he is not able to get the record because the record’s possessor won’t give it to him. He goes back again, and he finds the record’s possessor drunk in the street. Lapham goes on and gives more narrative.

Occasionally he throws in details that are not in the extant Book of Mormon text but that fit hand and glove. For instance, here, he says, “There was a great feast going on in the city of Jerusalem at the time,” so like a Jewish festival – and that’s why the guy, Laban, was drunk. The Book of Mormon text that we have doesn’t tell us that, but it does tell us things like this: Laban wasn’t just out drinking that night. It says he was out drinking with “the elders of the Jews.” He’s dressed in full, formal dress –like military dress – but he’s dressed very formally for a night of drinking.

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When Nephi has Zoram go get the brass plates to take out to the gates of the city to his brothers there who he thinks are the elders, Zoram doesn’t bat an eye. This all fits with there being something else going on, like a festival occasion. I think, actually, that I can identify the festival from other clues that are in the text – and that will be in the book – but that’s just one example of where Lapham throws in these additional details of familiar stories that fit.

Something new that he puts into his narrative that he’s reporting from Joseph Smith Sr. is that he says at one point during their travels, Lehi constructs a tabernacle. Tabernacle is, of course, the original Israelite temple – it’s a portable temple. It’s a big tent: a temple that you can put up and take down easily when you’re travelling.

Since Lehi and his family are between stationary temples – they’ve left Jerusalem, they’ve left behind Solomon’s temple – and haven’t yet gone to the Promised Land where Nephi’s going to build a new temple, they need some way to worship to live by the statutes of the Law of Moses, which requires a sanctuary. There are provisions in it that specifically require a sanctuary for certain sacrifices.

What Lapham describes – that Lehi would have used a tabernacle – fits with what we know from the Book of Mormon, but it’s not in our Book of Mormon text. He also says, by the way, that that tabernacle is where Lehi would go to consult the Liahona.

Brian Hales: That’s where he was able to get direction from the Liahona: in this sacred space that he had created that isn’t mentioned in our current Book of Mormon.

Don Bradley: Right.

Brian Hales: Now the obvious criticism – and this has been leveled at Nephi’s temple in the new world – is that the Mosaic law didn’t allow any other temples or tabernacles outside of the one in Jerusalem.

Any thoughts on that?

Don Bradley: Yeah. There’s some scholarly discussion and controversy over this because there was something that happened during Lehi’s life called the “Josian Reform” or the “Deuteronomic Reform.” Before the Josian reform, it appears that actually there were multiple Israelite temples. Archaeologists have found the ruins of a couple other Israelite temples. I think at least one of them was in Egypt. They’re similar in structure – not in size, but in structure – to Solomon’s temple or to the biblical tabernacle.

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Also, Lehi was leaving behind Solomon’s temple, which was about to be destroyed anyway. The Babylonians were about to come in and carry the Jews captive into Babylon into exile and to destroy Solomon’s temple. If Lehi’s people were to live the Law of Moses, they needed their own structure besides the one that they had left behind.

The later Jews don’t hesitate to rebuild the temple when they return to Jerusalem. I don’t see any reason why Lehi couldn’t have built his own tabernacle or why the Lord, who commanded that Solomon’s temple be built, couldn’t command another one to be built.

Brian Hales: Did Lehi see in his dreams the destruction of the temple, so he may have felt like it was going away anyway?

Don Bradley: I don’t remember if it specifically says that he saw the destruction of the temple. He does see the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of the people, but I would certainly imagine that the destruction of the temple would have been part of that.

Interestingly, he may not have needed to see things just in vision. The temple had already been desecrated. There’s this pregnant phrase early in 1 Nephi that we usually just kind of gloss over because it’s so familiar; it says that “It came to pass in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah,” etc., etc., and talks about how Lehi received his prophetic call.

What we don’t think about when we read that is, “How did Zedekiah’s reign commence?” The Bible actually tells us – and Babylonian records, for that matter, tell us—Zedekiah’s reign commenced because Nebuchadnezzar II sent his troops in and sieged Jerusalem, and the previous king, Jeconiah, surrendered. Then, Nebuchadnezzar placed Zedekiah on the throne in Jeconiah’s place and plundered the temple. It tells us that in 2 Kings - that he “plundered the temple and all the vessels of gold from the temple.”

What’s the most important sacred relic in the temple and what’s it made of? It’s the Ark of the Covenant, and it’s covered with gold. If the Ark of the Covenant had still been there before that, it was gone then. So when we read that phrase at the beginning of the Book of Mormon, “in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah,” remember what that means is that Babylon had just come in and started the Exile. They’d taken away the king, they’d taken away many of the nobles to Babylon, and they’d taken the most sacred treasures of the temple and desecrated the temple.

When Lehi is preaching to the people, “Jerusalem is going to be destroyed,” it shouldn’t have been a very surprising idea to them because

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Jerusalem had just been ransacked and the temple had just been desecrated. Lehi may have felt or been told that the temple of Jerusalem was no longer sacred and no longer active because the Ark of the Covenant that represented God’s presence had been taken away from it.

Brian Hales: Another one of the narratives that you write about in your manuscript, which I was able to read, deals with the interpreters. Now the interpreters are also called the Urim and Thummim – and I think it was William Smith who described them as “spectacles” – but that the bridge between the two eye pieces was too wide to actually wear them over your nose or to look through them at the same time, so Joseph would look through one and then shift and look through the other. They didn’t rest on the ears but instead were fastened to the breastplate for support.

Sidney B. Sperry and other scholars have noted that the stones came from the brother of Jared. We next find them, though, with Mosiah, (the son of King Benjamin), but we really don’t know how they got from the Jaredites to the Nephites. What have you found?

Don Bradley: You’re right. Sidney Sperry, John Tvedtnes, and others have identified this as one of what they call the “unanswered questions” of the Book of Mormon, meaning questions that are raised by the Book of Mormon text, but not answered by the Book of Mormon text – at least not by the Book of Mormon text that we have.

Fayette Lapham, it turns out, in his Joseph Smith Sr. interview, gives a story of how the Nephites get the interpreters, so he helps fill that narrative hole that we have in the extant text. His narrative basically goes like this: sometime after the Nephites have arrived in the New World, they’re traveling again. He doesn’t say how soon after – and I think it’s actually quite a while after – but they’re travelling again; they’re being led again by the Liahona. Apparently, they’re in-between stationary temples again because they construct a tabernacle during their journey.

Whoever it is who is using the Liahona – and Lapham doesn’t give a name; again, he doesn’t seem to know any of the names, so he just refers to whomever it is as “they” – so “they” were going along and led by the Liahona. Whoever this person is is led by the Liahona to an object. He doesn’t know what the object is and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to do with it once he finds it, so he takes it into the tabernacle to ask God what he’s supposed to do with this.

Once he walks into the tabernacle, the voice of the Lord asks him, “What is that in your hand?” Presumably this is the voice of the Lord coming to him from the Holy of Holies, where the presence of God was understood to dwell in the ancient Israelite temples. The voice of the Lord speaks to him and says, “What is that in your hand?”

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According to Lapham, he says that he “did not know, but had come to inquire.” Then the Lord tells him, “Put this object on your face and put your face in an animal skin.” He does and once he does, he can see anything – it’s the interpreters.

Lapham, who apparently doesn’t know the Book of Mormon very well, for all he gets right about it – he actually makes some pretty substantial mistakes. He seems to place the events at the beginning of the Book of Mormon back near the time of the Exodus, for instance (which anybody who has read 1 Nephi 1 would know better). He has managed to provide a narrative that tells how the Nephites would have gotten the interpreters. This narrative, like a lot of Book of Mormon narratives, has heavy echoes from the Old Testament and particularly the story of the Exodus.

For instance, the question that the Lord asks: “What is that in your hand” – that’s Exodus 4:2, where the Lord asks Moses out of the burning bush on Sinai, “What is that in thine hand?” It’s Moses’s staff in that case. The veiling of the face: this is, again, Moses on Sinai. This is the second time Moses is on Sinai, when he goes up to get the stone tablets (the Ten Commandments), and he comes down and his face is shining, so he veils his face.

The wrapping of a sacred object in an animal skin – this is also the Exodus. The biblical Tabernacle was built during the Exodus--at Sinai-- and when it was built, it had various coverings, and the outer covering was supposed to be made from badger skins – and sacred relics, the sacred vessels of the temple, when the Tabernacle’s being taken apart, and it’s all being transported, are supposed to be wrapped in badger skins.

The narrative that Lapham is given and gives us, then, fits with the Book of Mormon narrative, even though the person who’s giving us the narrative doesn’t seem to know that much about the Book of Mormon.

Brian Hales: You’ve drawn a parallel between Exodus and how the interpreters were used by Mosiah. Have you found any other parallels perhaps by the way Joseph Smith used the interpreters?

Don Bradley: Yeah. This narrative that we’re given by Fayette Lapham apparently from Joseph Smith Sr. could shed light on a very unusual practice of Joseph Smith Jr’s. A lot of people know – and maybe some don’t – that when Joseph was translating the Book of Mormon, he didn’t always use the interpreters; sometimes he used another seer stone besides those two interpreters. When he does, he reportedly puts the seer stone in his hat and then looks into the hat and is able to see the translation in that way.

In light of the story about the Nephites finding the interpreters, this practice of Joseph Smith’s makes way more sense. I looked, and I found a

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source that describes what Joseph Smith’s hat was made of: it was beaver skin. Beaver skin hats were a very popular kind of hat at the time. The one source that describes what Joseph Smith’s hat was made of says it was a beaver skin hat.

Joseph doesn’t understand himself to be putting his face in a hat to look at the seer stone and translate; rather, he is putting his face in an animal skin, which is a pattern that he finds in this story of Mosiah I, and is a pattern that echoes the biblical narratives of the Exodus and how they would wrap the sacred relics in animal skin.

Brian Hales: So King Mosiah – and we’re talking about King Benjamin’s father – is the one who is led by the Liahona to discover the interpreters and that’s how the Nephites come into possession of them – then they’re passed to King Benjamin and his son, King Mosiah, which is the story we hear about in the book of Mosiah.

Don Bradley: Right. There’s a lot of evidence that points to this narrative being about Mosiah I, and I won’t try to go into most of it right not, but I will mention that there is evidence from the Book of Mormon text – the earliest manuscripts – that King Benjamin actually had the interpreters, which makes sense because we know that King Mosiah II has them and uses them. But we have the entire story of Mosiah II’s reign, and it never mentions what would have been a momentous event: the finding of the interpreters.

So he apparently just gets them from his father. It talks in our Mosiah Chapter 1 about how the relics are passed on to him. This was apparently one of the relics. Like I said, there are other evidences from the early Book of Mormon manuscripts that King Benjamin had the interpreters. Well, where did Benjamin get them?

If you look in the , we’re given just a very brief summary of Mosiah I’s narrative – which, for the record, I think was one of the coolest narratives in the Book of Mormon and fortunately, even though we don’t have that full narrative, we’ve got quite a bit of evidence about what was in that narrative – and I think providentially, we have that evidence. I think that the Lord made sure that we have evidence about some of these key things from the lost pages so that we can better understand.

In the story of Mosiah I, in the Book of Omni, it talks about him making an exodus from the land of Lehi to the land of , so they would have been between temples. It talks about how after he gets to Zarahelma, there’s a Jaredite stone record that’s brought to him, and he interprets the engravings on it. Now, it doesn’t say how he interprets the engravings, but that’s kind of what the “interpreters” are for and where they get their name from, so that implies, and other scholars have noted this as well, that

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Mosiah I had the interpreters. We have no evidence, no stories that imply that anyone before Mosiah I had the interpreters, so it appears that Fayette Lapham is giving us a story about Mosiah I, his exodus, and how he found the interpreters.

Brian Hales: And doesn’t Omni say that he interpreted the stone by the gift and power of God?

Don Bradley: Oh, it does! Yes. And that same phrasing is elsewhere used with specific reference to the interpreters.

Brian Hales: Now Don, you’ve mentioned the Liahona a number of times, but we don’t find it being used by King Benjamin or Mosiah or in any of the wars or other opportunities to learn direction. Any insights on why the Liahona suddenly stops working?

Don Bradley: Yes. This was a detail that I had omitted from my recitation of the Fayette Lapham interview with Joseph Smith Sr. about the finding of the interpreters.

Early in the Book of Mormon, the Liahona is being used all the time. Later in the Book of Mormon, it’s still being handed down. In Alma 37, we’ve got Alma the Younger handing it on to his son Helaman, so they’ve got it, but then you’ve got all of those wars in the Book of Alma where they sure could’ve used something like that to guide them in the wilderness and to let them know where their enemies were, but they’re not using it. Why?

Well, like I said, the Joseph Smith Sr. interview actually gives an explanation of this unanswered question of the Book of Mormon as well as the other one that we discussed. That is that Lapham says that once the man had been led by the Liahona to the interpreters and started using the interpreters, the Liahona stopped working – so apparently the Liahona’s just being supplanted; it’s being replaced.

That would explain why it continues to be handed down as a sacred relic, but is no longer used. So the information given by Joseph Smith Sr. to Fayette Lapham from the lost pages answers both of these “unanswered questions” from the Book of Mormon text we currently have.

Brian Hales: Okay. It had two spindles in it.

Don Bradley: Yes. It tells us in the Book of Mormon that there was one spindle that pointed the direction that they should go, so it’s clear what one spindle was for, but it doesn’t tell us what the other one was for. Why would there be a need for a second spindle? Does it just point randomly? What is it for?

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A close associate of Martin Harris actually gave a description of the Liahona that explains the function of the second spindle. He says if you were to look at the surface of the Liahona, around the edges you had characters or pictures or something that indicated different things such as food, water, other types of provisions, and so on. According to him, the function of the second spindle was that the second spindle showed you what the first spindle was pointing you to.

Brian Hales: Oh, my goodness.

Don Bradley: If the Liahona was now pointing you not to the promised land, but where to go for wild game, so you can eat – and you don’t want to take the whole clan, the whole family, and have them go up in the mountains to look for game – the Liahona actually tells you it’s not pointing the way to the promised land. It’s pointing to food so that the hunters can go and get food.

Brian Hales: I’ve had a question as I’ve read the part of the Book of Mormon where we find Mosiah travelling to the land of Zarahemla, where they meet the Mulekites.

Don Bradley: Yeah.

Brian Hales: Mosiah arrives there, and they’re much more numerous than Mosiah and his followers that traveled from the land of Nephi. Then the next thing we learn is that Mosiah is king over the whole land of Zarahelma.

Don Bradley: Right.

Brian Hales: He’s a refugee. He shows up and, shortly thereafter, they all united behind him. That just seemed a little odd to me.

Don Bradley: Yeah – and it’s actually even more odd than it may seem on the surface.

Not only does the extant Book of Mormon text tell us that the Mulekites were much more numerous than the Nephites but we also have the Mulekites being a stationary people – an established people, established in the land of Zarahemla – and the Nephites are coming in as refugees. They’re a smaller group of refugees coming into their land.

It’s not clear actually that Mosiah I had been their king in their earlier land – and that’s something that I’ll explore in the book – but another reason why this is very strange that he ends up becoming the king over the united Nephite–Mulekite nation is that you’ve got to look at who the Mulekites were ruled by.

What we’re told is that King Zarahemla was a descendent of Zedekiah, so he is actually the heir of King David. He is the scion of the House of

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David. He, in theory, has right to rule over the entire House of Israel. He’s the heir of David, who had been divinely selected as king and to start a dynasty.

I don’t know completely why Mosiah I becomes king. I do have some thoughts. I think this was explained more in the lost pages. The new promised land is not the promised land of Judah like the old promised land that Lehi’s family had left. The new promised land as spelled out by Christ in 3 Nephi – I’m not remembering the chapter - is a promised land for the seed of Joseph.

Zarahelma is a king from the line of Judah, but Mosiah is a king from the line of Joseph through the dynasty of Nephi, so he may have had greater right to rule in the new promised land, though of course they would need to convince the Mulekites of that. Also, he was a seer, and that would be a big difference.

In Mosiah 8, it equates being a seer – having the interpreters – with wisdom, having divine wisdom. That evokes Solomon. Solomon had been divinely given wisdom; he’s the wisest man in the world. Any king who had the interpreters is effectively the wisest man in the world as a result. He’s kind of a new Solomon.

I think there are other factors that take a little longer to lay out that, again, I think were spelled out in the lost pages and that I’m exploring in my manuscript.

Brian Hales: Have you found any parallels between Mosiah I, who’s King Benjamin’s father, as they leave the land of Nephi and ultimately arrive in Zarahemla – that exodus? Any parallels to Moses and his exodus?

Don Bradley: There might be a parallel starting right from Mosiah I’s name. Hugh Nibley suggested that the name Mosiah might best be seen as a combination of Moses and Josiah, who was the leader of a major reform of Israelite religion in Lehi’s time. I think that there’s something to that identification that Nibley made. I think that Mosiah I, then, is framed as a kind of new Moses. Certainly what we have in the Joseph Smith Sr. interview, if we understand that to be about Mosiah I, is chock-full of allusions back to Moses and the Exodus. It’s following a kind of Exodus typology where there are multiple echoes, particularly of Sinai and of the tabernacle.

Again, this is another thing that would take longer to develop, but there are hints that on the exodus of Mosiah I, they’ve got effectively their own Sinai: there’s a certain mountain or hill that they stop at that has particular sacred significance on their journey.

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Brian Hales: And they’re seeking for a promised land?

Don Bradley: Right. They’re seeking a new promised land.

Mosiah I, as I see him, is a new Moses. He’s also kind of a new Lehi and a new Nephi; he’s also kind of a new David. He’s got lots of roles that combine into one guy, and that’s one of the reasons why, as I mentioned, to me his narrative, so far as we can reconstruct it, is one of the coolest of the Book of Mormon.

Brian Hales: Alrighty, Don. In your upcoming book, you will cite historical documents that have never been published before. Tell us how you found them.

Don Bradley: I found them in a variety of ways – and again, some of the clues, like I mentioned, are in the familiar Book of Mormon text that there are millions of copies of, but there are some other sources that have not been published before.

One of those would be the Emer Harris source that I mentioned earlier. I found that at the LDS Church Archives as I was doing research. I was not looking for something on the lost 116 pages, because I had no idea that that cool, cool detail that he gives about the Mulekites was in there. I was looking at that source – the stake conference minutes – for other reasons and just stumbled on that and, you know, my eyes popped out of my head because I’d already started doing research on the lost 116 pages before that, so that just sort of added to the arsenal.

One source that I’ve got came to me because I knew descendants of the person who had written this journal. They found out what I was working on, and they said, “Hey, here are images from this journal,” and they sent them to me.

There are other sources that are in online collections like archive.org; there are other sources that are at the LDS Archives and just a variety of places.

Brian Hales: One last question, in a recent Facebook post, you had written that through your research, you’d come to conclude that “God is in this.” You were saying it more, I thought, as a scholarly conclusion rather than a testimony. It wasn’t in the context or in a thread that was devotional.

Is it your research with the 116 pages or can you just explain maybe a little bit more about why you would come to that conclusion?

Don Bradley: Yes. Part of what I had in mind did have to do with the lost pages. A good part of what I had in mind there in particular had to do with seeing the hand of God, the hand of providence, in Joseph Smith’s life. Joseph Smith certainly perceived the hand of providence in his life and the more that I study his life, the details of it, the more I see it. It’s amazing and

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miraculous how just the most improbable circumstances in the world just lined up to open up certain opportunities for Joseph Smith to kind of guide him in certain directions.

That is something where, as a scholar, I’m just amazed at all of the “coincidences” that had to be there in order for Joseph Smith’s prophetic mission to really go forward, and they were all there.

Now about the 116 pages in particular, yes. I don’t know if you know this, but several years ago, I had strayed from the church and part of what initially helped me to come back were things that I was finding in my research. I was doing research on the lost 116 pages and also in association with that doing research trying to understand the Book of Mormon text that we have better and the .

In my research on all of those things – and particularly the lost pages – I found that there were things that I couldn’t have expected - at all. For instance, some scholars have pointed out that Nephite religion, as we’re presented with it in the Book of Mormon, is a lot like Israelite religion before the Josian reform, which happened in Lehi’s youth. There’s quite a bit in my own research, particularly on Mosiah I, that adds to that – that backs that up.

Another thing that particularly impressed me at this point, where as I said I had strayed away from the church and from the gospel, was that I had had this idea that Joseph Smith had evolved from being a quasi-Protestant (or maybe a Protestant) early on to being a Mormon in Nauvoo – and by Mormon, I mean having the distinctive theology and the distinctive ritual that we associate with the temple, right? Things that are very much “Mormon” and that are not shared by other Christian groups. As I did this research, particularly on the Fayette Lapham account of the finding of the interpreters, I was blown away by some of the implications that I saw there.

There are things that anticipate the temple ceremony. There’s a dialogue that Mosiah has with God, and some of the details of that dialogue were very impressive to me. I had never expected that I would find “Nauvoo ” in this document that had been dictated in 1828.

So there was that – and there were other things that went with that – that were just huge eye-openers that really expanded my mind and helped to initiate, really, the process of my own return to faith.

Brian Hales: We’re really glad that you’re back.

Don Bradley: Thank you.

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Brian Hales: We appreciate your research here. I think all of the listeners are going to be excited for your book because even though you’ve hit on some very, very interesting findings, you’ve also alluded to many more that we haven’t got time to discuss, so we’ll be anxious to read that.

Don, thank you so much for your friendship, but also for being with us today on LDS Perspectives Podcast.

Don Bradley: Thank you, Brian.

Disclaimer: LDS Perspectives Podcast is not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The opinions expressed on this episode represent the views of the guys and the podcaster alone, and LDS Perspectives Podcast and its parent organization may or may not agree with them. While the ideas presented may vary from traditional understandings or teachings, they in no way reflect criticism of LDS Church leaders, policies, or practices.

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