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By the Hand of Mormon By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion by Terryl L. Givens Oxford Univ. Press, 2002 320 pp., $16.95, paper The New Mormon Challenge The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement Edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser, and Paul Owen Zondervan, 2002 535 pp., $27.99

On September 22, 1827, in upstate New York, a 21-year-old farm boy announced that he had recovered a cache of metal plates from a nearby hill where they had been buried for some 1,400 years. Using several instruments deposited with the plates, Joseph Smith, Jr. translated the Book of Mormon in about nine months, from September 1828 to June 1829, dictating the text to several close friends. The new world scripture that was published in March of 1830 in Palmyra tells of a civilization sprung from the Hebrew prophet Lehi, who had departed Jerusalem in the sixth century before Christ and migrated to the new world. These people were advanced for the times in which they lived; they constructed magnificent cities and temples, produced advanced implements, and drafted sophisticated laws. The account continued through the fourth century AD, when these people were privileged with a visitation by the resurrected Christ and promised a future ingathering in which a new Jerusalem would be set up in North America.

A little more than a decade after the publication of this book, explorer John Lloyd Stephens and artist Frederick Catherwood returned from an expedition to Chiapas and the Yucatan with remarkable descriptions and drawings of ancient cities, including temple complexes, palaces, stone towers, and hieroglyphic tablets. This first English-language account of Mayan civilization in 1841 was, in the words of Terryl L. Givens, a "defining moment in the history of the Book of Mormon." It is a mark of Givens' candor (he writes as a committed Mormon), and an indication of the rigor of his method, that he describes in detail how Joseph Smith immediately shifted the provenance of the Book of Mormon from its connection with native North Americans to the ruins of a lost civilization in Central America. It was Smith himself who thereby "decisively thrust the Book of Mormon into a role from which it has never fully extricated itself." The new world revelation was, by this act, forever connected with the intractable stuff of historical fact, and only much later would it become clear that the dates of the decline of Mayan civilization could be reconciled to the Mormon account only with difficulty. In fascinating detail, Givens' book surveys the enormous advances that have been made in Mormon historical and literary research, particularly in the last 30 years. These advances are so significant that in a 1999 article, Mormon scholar Daniel Peterson can, in an off-hand remark, compare the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi Library in the mid-20th century to the "recovery" of the book of Mormon in the early 19th century.

Such a statement, however casually intended, is nothing if not contentious. Indeed, since the year of its publication, the Book of Mormon has been the subject of unparalleled critique and spirited defense, and the debate shows no signs of being resolved any time soon, as the chapters of The New Mormon Challenge amply testify. But the tone of the debate and the depth and seriousness of the research on both sides of the divide have changed dramatically, and both of the books under review are excellent examples of a significant, new departure. Givens' treatment of the history of scholarship on the Book of Mormon is simply the best, most judicious and engaging survey available. His handling of all of the evidence surrounding the original discovery and translation of the plates is as clear, judicious, and balanced as one could wish. Throughout, he strives to maintain a tension between the use of evidence and his own Mormon convictions; on the one hand, he is well aware of the "fragility of the book's historical claims," but on the other, he describes an "extensive" and "continuous" body of evidence that he thinks supports "the tactile reality of supernaturally conveyed artifacts." Smith's every vision of God and every angelic visitation is faithfully recorded in ways that substantiate Mormon beliefs regarding his stature as a prophet and the Book of Mormon as revealed scripture.

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