Where Did the Book of Mormon Come From?
The short answer is…Joseph Smith made it up.
Many readers will not be surprised to learn that Joseph Smith (the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints) conceptualized and created the Book of Mormon. But for faithful Mormons, this fact is life-altering. Members of the Mormon church grow up learning that the Book of Mormon is a true story, that it was written on a set of metal plates by ancient people, and that it was delivered to Smith by God to bring into the world.
According to Mormon teachings, God told Smith where to find a set of golden plates that contained a record of an ancient civilization and God’s teachings to them. Smith, through God’s power, translated what was on the plates into English and subsequently published the Book of Mormon. Everything in the Church, and in members’ lives, rests of the veracity of the Book of Mormon. It contains many of the foundational doctrines of the Church, including repentance, redemption, and salvation. If the Book of Mormon is true, then all the other parts of the religion are true. When shady aspects of Smith’s character come out (e.g., he was charged with fraudulent treasure hunting, he practiced polygamy and polyandry), members say, “He was a flawed human, but the doctrine revealed to him by God is perfect.”
The overall story of the Book of Mormon is this: In 600 B.C., God instructed a group of people to leave the wickedness in Jerusalem and find a land of promise. They traversed the desert and came to the ocean. God helped them build a boat, and they sailed to the Americas. Their population grew; a wicked leader led away some members of the group; and thereafter the two factions had various prophets, successes and failures, and wars between them. In time, they run into and join together with other groups led by God from Jerusalem to the Promised Land.
The book also describes a three-day visit from Jesus to this cluster of people right after he was killed in Jerusalem. Jesus (in resurrected form) taught them many of the same things he taught his disciples in the Middle East. There was a period of peace after Jesus’ visit, but eventually (around 400 A.D.), the more wicked band fought the righteous group in a spectacular battle where more than 100,000 people were killed.
Many members of the LDS faith have heard certain criticisms of the Book of Mormon, such as the fact that DNA evidence shows no ties between modern indigenous people and Middle East populations; there is no archeological evidence to confirm the existence of any of these groups, their centers of civilization, or their epic battles; and horses, steel, chariots and sheep show up anachronistically in the book. But these are easily dismissed. Sure, researchers say there’s no evidence, but it’s possible they’re wrong. Maybe they just haven’t found it yet.
More detailed and more damning arguments against the Book of Mormon are not as well-known by members. Mormon adherents are discouraged from reading any criticisms of their church or their scripture. They are warned that this information comes from people trying to attack the Church and that reading this material will weaken their faith. If they were to read from these sources, they would find out basic facts about the Bible and Christian religions that cause the foundation of the Book of Mormon to collapse. Some examples:
· In the beginning of the Book of Mormon (600 B.C.), the leader of the first group, Lehi, carries with him a set of plates (referred to as the Brass Plates) that supposedly had the books of Moses written on them.Bible scholars tell us that those Old Testament books weren’t written down until the second or third centuries A.D.
· Similarly, the Book of Mormon quotes chapters of Isaiah and Malachi, saying they were found in the Brass Plates. But the accounts in these books hadn’t even happened, let alone were not written down, until after Lehi left Jerusalem. Also, in the Book of Mormon Malachi is referred to as a person, but scholars now say that Malachi is a title, not a name.
· The Sermon on the Mount is extensively quoted in the Book of Mormon and is word-for-word the same as the story in the King James Version of the New Testament. Bible scholars now believe that the Sermon on the Mount was not one sermon, but a compilation of Jesus’ teachings, spoken on different occasions.
· All of the sections quoted from the Bible include the mistakes found in the King James Version, such as mistranslations and italicized words where translators were unsure.
· The distinction between Jesus and God is important in the Mormon faith. Elohim (God) is the God of the Old Testament, and Jehovah (Jesus) is the God of the New Testament. This purportedly explains the difference in tone between the two. However, researchers now know that Jehovah is simply a mistranslation of Yahweh, the term for God in the Torah and early sections of the Old Testament.
These are compelling reasons for why the Book of Mormon is not true, but the question remains: where did it come from? This is what perplexes people who are questioning their belief in the Church. They may be troubled by the Church’s racist past or current problematic teachings about LGBTQ people, but they can’t leave the Church altogether if the Book of Mormon is true. The complex language and the stunning doctrines found within it make it seem to be written and inspired by God.
However, the Church’s story that Joseph Smith “translated” what was written on the golden plates is showing some cracks. The Church has been more forthright in recent years about the method of his translating. Smith claimed to have a “seer stone,” another artifact that God had given to him, that helped him as a prophet and a translator. Where they once said Smith read from the plates, the Church now admits that he put the seer stone inside a top hat, placed a blanket or towel over his head to block out the light, and dictated the words to a scribe (he had various scribes throughout the process). The plates sat on the table beside him, never to be touched or consulted. They were covered with a cloth at all times. No one ever actually saw them except Smith.
It makes sense that he was not reading directly from the plates because the language of the first draft, what the scribes wrote as he dictated, was not Old English scriptural language. Pictures of that first draft show that it was written in the folksy dialect of Smith’s time and region. The sentences are more like, “They went a-journeying up the hill,” than, “They took their journey up the hill.” The verbs written in this informal way were later changed to the more sophisticated form.
The short answer to the question “Where did the Book of Mormon come from?” is Joseph Smith made it up. Considered from our current perspective, this might seem an amazing task for a young adult in the 1820s. But if we could immerse ourselves in Smith’s time, it would not be so miraculous.
The Book of Mormon answers a question that was much debated by the Euroamericans in his time: where did the Native Americans come from? The descendants of the European colonizers were obsessed with this question and discussed it endlessly. Origin stories, oral and written, were common, imaginative, and fanciful (and complete fiction).
Smith enjoyed hearing these stories and eventually began making up his own. Around the evening fire, he regaled his family with make-believe anecdotes of ancient native peoples. His mother wrote in her diary about these stories and Smith’s wonderful imagination long before he supposedly received the gold plates. By the time he dictated the story to his scribes, he had been working out the characters, timeline, and plot for years.
The main story arc of the Book of Mormon is derived from the Moundbuilder Myth. In Smith’s time, the Ohio River Valley contained complex structures collectively referred to as “mounds.” There were very tall mounds, mound groups, and mounds in geometric shapes. European settlers were fascinated by these mounds and convinced themselves that they must have been built by a superior race, a white race, and not the indigenous peoples existing in the area at that time. This theory bolstered their white supremacist beliefs and assuaged their guilt around displacing Native Americans.
According to an article about the Moundbuilder Myth on Thoughtco.com, by the late 1870s scholars “reported conclusive evidence that there was no physical difference between the people buried in the mounds and modern Native Americans. Subsequent DNA research has proven that time and again. Scholars then and today recognized that the ancestors of modern Native Americans were responsible for all of the prehistoric mound constructions in North America.”
It was an uphill battle to convince the public, however, and tragically, once the public did come to accept that the “Lost Race” of superior whites who built the mounds was a myth, they destroyed many if not most of the thousands of mounds in the American Midwest. Again from Thoughtco.com: “…settlers simply plowed away the evidence that a civilized, intelligent and capable people had been driven from their rightful lands.”
Smith not only took his idea for the Book of Mormon from this racist myth, but he also reinforced the theory and helped it live on into the twenty-first century in the form of supposedly sacred scripture. Millions of Mormons believe that some of the Native Americans descend from groups of people led by God from Jerusalem to the Americas.
The Book of Mormon takes white supremacist ideas even further, however. When some of these white-skinned people sinned and fell away from the church of their time, their skin turned dark and “loathesome.” According to these scriptures, this was a curse from God for their wickedness and a method of keeping the lighter-skinned righteous people from intermarrying with them.
If they returned to keeping the commandments, their skin would (magically) turn light again. (It would be difficult to come up with a more racist storyline than this.) At the end of the book, the wicked people overpower the righteous in the aforementioned epic battle, and all the virtuous (white) people are killed, except one lone man who wanders the land trying to avoid the immoral and nefarious dark-skinned peoples.
Smith was just one of many in his time making up stories to explain where the existing native populations came from and how the elaborate structures around him were formed. He heard the invented tales and joined in on creating them. He had been reading the Bible since his youth. In fact, it was his only reading material during a long recovery from a leg injury. He knew the wording and the teachings well enough to regurgitate the stories and doctrines with slight variations. He simply had to fill in some details about the people, places, and storyline. Creative and imaginative from his youth, he had no problem doing so.
In case this information has not been convincing enough, I will add a few more details about where and how Smith came up with the Book of Mormon.
· The language of the Book of Mormon seems sophisticated and complex from our modern perspective, but most of the books in Smith’s time used similar language. Two books in particular, The Late War and View of the Hebrews, are acutely similar to the Book of Mormon in style and content. These books were available in Smith’s time and region.
· The names of the characters and places in the Book of Mormon seem unfamiliar now but can be traced to acquaintances of Smith’s, cities in his surrounding area, or fictional places from stories he had read.
· In the beginning chapters of the Book of Mormon, the leader and patriarch of the group, Lehi, has a dream about a “tree of life.” Smith’s father (Joseph Smith, Sr.) recorded a very similar dream in his diary a few months before Smith supposedly received the golden plates and started dictating the Book of Mormon.
· The term “secret combinations” is used in the Book of Mormon to connote immoral agreements among men in the book that prove the eventual demise of the civilized (white) society. Andrew Jackson ran for president around the time Smith dictated the Book of Mormon. There were claims that the “secret combinations” of his Masonic associations would be the downfall of America. (Ironically, Smith later used the Masonic temple rites as a pattern for the temple ceremonies he penned.)
Those outside the Mormon church are often astounded that anyone could believe that the Book of Mormon tells an inspired and true story. But similar to Christian children learning the sometimes bizarre and often far-fetched Bible stories, when you grow up hearing the narratives and everyone tells you they are true, it’s easiest to just accept it. Using critical thinking skills (often called “doubting” in church circles) is discouraged and might result in alienation from your family and community. Most members of the Mormon church don’t know all of the above facts. Some know they could search out such material but instead purposely avoid it. Finding out new information can disrupt your life, and this is never truer than for believing Mormons.
For many members, however, there comes a point when things don’t make sense. The discomfort of your cognitive dissonance becomes too strong, and you feel compelled to seek more information. When you learn the method of Smith’s dictation, what scholars now know about Bible history, the similarity to contemporary books and ideas, and where the inspiration for the storyline came from, the existence of the Book of Mormon is not such a mystery.
