Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?

Ever since the Book of Mormon was first published in 1830, its origins have been disputed. As Joseph Smith, the founder of the rapidly growing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), tells it in official church writings, the book is a miraculous translation of “reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics” on golden plates he dug out of a hillside in 1827 near Palmyra, New York, a village between Rochester and Syracuse. But as some of his contemporaries and a number of modern critics allege, the book is at least partly the pirated work of Solomon Spaulding (or Spalding), a retired Congregationalist minister and novelist who died near Pittsburgh in 1816.

The issue is a critical one for the Latter-day Saints: they believe that the 522-page Book of Mormon is the divinely inspired, correctly translated Word of God. As such, it has been called the “keystone” of the 3.8-million-member Mormon church by LDS leaders. If the book is ever proved to be something other than what Joseph Smith claimed, the church’s foundation itself will be in question. At stake also will be Smith’s credibility in other basic documents of the church (Doctrine and Covenants and The Pearl of Great Price).

Until now, the critics’ case has rested on circumstantial evidence (similarities of style and subject matter, and testimonies of perhaps biased persons claiming to know of a relationship between Smith and another man who may have had access to a Spaulding manuscript).

Now, however, three young researchers in southern California claim they have a firm case. They obtained enlarged photocopies of several of the original manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon that are in archives in Salt Lake City. These reproductions and known specimens of Spaulding’s handwriting were submitted to three prominent handwriting analysts with impressive credentials. Working independently, and unaware of the Book of Mormon connection, all three analysts concluded that Spaulding had written all the material they examined.

The manuscript section in question is part of the so-called Kimball acquisition of twenty-two pages of First Nephi, as dictated by Smith to “an unidentified scribe,” according to Mormon historians. (Smith used a number of scribes in his work, producing more than 4,000 words a day for between sixty-five and ninety days, according to a Mormon authority. Two manuscripts were produced. One—the edited printer’s copy—is in the archives of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Missouri. Smith placed the original manuscript in the cornerstone of a house in Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1841. In 1882 a wing of the house was torn down, and the contents of the cornerstone were scattered. Mormon member Sarah M. Kimball in 1883 obtained the most legible of the remaining manuscript pages from the man who married Smith’s widow. Other pages—about 120—and fragments were obtained later.)

In a book to be published by Vision House, the three researchers—Howard A. Davis, Donald R. Scales, and Wayne L. Cowdrey—tell their story, attempting to document the links between Spaulding’s work and that of Smith years later.

The three handwriting analysts they cite are Howard C. Doulder, William Kaye, and Henry Silver, all from the Los Angeles area. All are in private practice, are nationally recognized experts in examining questioned documents, and are often called on to testify in court cases. Doulder formerly was a document examiner for the Milwaukee police department and the U.S. Treasury Department, and he has served as chairman of the Questioned Document sections of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences and the International Association for Identification. Kaye’s clients have included many large business firms, the Michigan attorney general’s office, and Scotland Yard. Among the thousands of cases the internationally known Silver has been involved in is the dispute over the Howard E. Hughes estate.

Doulder says his identification of the Spaulding handwriting is a “qualified opinion” that can be rendered “positive” only if he examines the original documents. Kaye offers his “considered opinion and conclusion that all of the [examined] writings were executed by Solomon Spalding” (the spelling used by the authors throughout their work). But, says he, to be more exact about dating, he would have to examine the original documents. Silver’s opinion is unqualified.

In response to the allegations—and implications—LDS press spokesman Don LeFevre issued the following statement: “The authenticity of the Book of Mormon has been challenged by many during the past 147 years. The so-called Spaulding story was long ago laid to rest by even the most credible of [anti-Mormon] critics. The book has held up under other attacks over the years and will withstand the latest allegations as well. Truth is unchanging, and the truth of the matter is that the Book of Mormon is precisely what the church has always maintained it is. It is a divinely revealed scriptural record of ancient American people. More specifically, it joins with the Bible as a witness of the divinity of Jesus Christ.”

Dean Jessee, a church historian who categorized the various manuscript remnants, said: “Any competent handwriting analyst will easily spot numerous differences in the two hands. In fact, even the untrained eye can see the basic differences.”

Will the church have an analysis of the handwriting made? “We don’t need to,” replied a spokesman. “We know where the manuscript came from.”

During an interview, LDS historian-editor Leonard J. Arrington led this reporter to a vault and presented the now-laminated manuscript pages for examination. The Kimball-acquisition pages, ragged at the edges, are a little over six inches wide by sixteen inches long, and the paper seems to be uniform in stock and age. They are written on both sides in black ink, and appear to be in sequence, although the handwriting seems to differ from section to section. Jessee has tentatively assigned two of the sections to John Whitmer and Oliver Cowdery, close associates of Smith who were among the “witnesses” to the authenticity of the Book of Mormon. The other section is the one that Jessee says was written by “an unidentified scribe”—but which the handwriting experts have identified as the work of Solomon Spaulding. (The experts have not examined the other two sections.)

Since Spaulding wrote at least fourteen years or so before Smith began dictating, the casual observer is left wondering how there can be so much similarity in paper and ink quality throughout the Kimball acquisition.

The three researchers believe they may be able to come up with answers if experts are permitted to examine the original documents. Press spokesman LeFevre told CHRISTIANITY TODAY that the researchers are welcome to inspect the manuscript pages.

The Book of Mormon is basically the story of two migrations of people from the Middle East to the Americas, the first from the Tower of Babel about 2250 B.C., the second from Jerusalem about 600 B.C. American Indians are portrayed as descendents of one of the immigrant families, the Lamanites, who were cursed with a dark skin because of sin. Moroni, the last survivor of another family, the Nephites (who alone used the “reformed Egyptian” language and who were preached to by Christ after his resurrection), in 421 A.D. buried a set of plates on which his father Mormon had inscribed a record of the migrations and struggles. Fourteen hundred years later, Moroni delivered the plates to Smith, according to Mormon teaching.

Large chunks of the Book of Mormon are passages from the King James version of the Bible. Anthropologists and archeologists have generally scoffed at the historical sections of the book, and they say there never has been such a written or verbal language as “reformed Egyptian.”

There are indications that Smith liked to dig for hidden treasure as a youth and that he resorted to “peep stones” as a fortune-telling aid in finding it. Legal records in New York show he was arrested several times between 1826 and 1830 for fortune-telling practices.

No one but Smith ever saw the gold plates (Moroni took them away after making sure the translation was correct), and he usually dictated from behind a curtain.

Some critics cite similarities between what Smith produced and what James Adair wrote in his History of the American People (London, 1778).

Those who believe Smith made use of a Spaulding manuscript usually implicate a Baptist-turned-Campbellite preacher named Sidney Rigdon, who officially converted to Smith’s new faith shortly after it was founded in 1830. Several sources indicate that both Spaulding and Rigdon moved to the Pittsburgh area about 1812. Spaulding left a manuscript of a novel known as “Manuscript Found” at a Pittsburgh printer. It subsequently disappeared. The novel reportedly attempted to portray a biblical origin of American Indians. Friends of Rigdon are on record saying he showed them such a novel. And they say that Rigdon had a close friend who worked at the print shop where Spaulding’s novel had been left.

Rigdon served as pastor of a small Baptist church in Pittsburgh from about 1820 to 1823, when he was ousted in a controversy over doctrine. He drifted back to Ohio where he became identified with the Campbellite movement and its emphasis on “restoration” of the true church, a prominent theme in the Mormon faith. Anti-Mormon researchers believe he met Joseph Smith in his travels in the later 1820s. Several sightings of Rigdon and Smith together are reported in documents, but so far no hard evidence of such a link has been uncovered.

In 1884 a Spaulding manuscript was found by the president of Oberlin College on a visit to Hawaii. Its title was “Manuscript Story.” It contained some parallels to the Book of Mormon but no verbatim passages. Mormon leaders later announced that “Manuscript Story” and “Manuscript Found” were the same manuscript, thus dismissing the alleged Spaulding link to Mormonism. Anti-Mormon students claimed, however, that “Manuscript Found” was a different work, a contention backed by Spaulding’s daughter Matilda. In the August, 1880, issue of Scribner’s, she declared that she had heard her father read to her from “Manuscript Found,” and that it contained many of the names and references mentioned in the Book of Mormon.

If the California handwriting experts are correct, part of “Manuscript Found” has indeed been found—incorporated in the Book of Mormon, and safely stored by the LDS church. Why a scribe would insert the Spaulding pages themselves into the manuscript instead of rewriting them remains open to conjecture.

Mormon doctrine states that man exists as a spirit before birth. His destiny is to become a god or a ministering angel. To become a god he must in this life embrace the Mormon faith, be baptized, marry celestially (have a spouse for the next life), and engage in good works. Salvation is synonymous with resurrection, and everyone will be saved (resurrected), some to be gods, some to be angels with still another chance to try for godhood. To accommodate those who lived in pre-Mormon times, baptism and celestial marriage ceremonies are performed by proxy for the dead in secret temple rites (hence the Mormon emphasis on genealogical study). If one is born black it means that he sinned in his earlier state; this bars him from full participation in the Mormon church in this life and confines him to angelhood in the next life (from which he can strive toward godhood).

Smith and his followers ran into disfavor and had to keep moving. From New York they went to Ohio, then Missouri (where they believed God would establish his kingdom Zion), and Illinois, where Smith was lynched by a mob in 1844. Rigdon was excommunicated in a power struggle with other leaders. Under Brigham Young’s leadership the Mormons trekked to Utah in 1847.

The Mormons enjoy a high degree of public respect today, thanks to their famed Tabernacle Choir, welfare programs, genealogical projects, emphasis on family life and clean living, and pursuit of old-fashioned American virtues. The LDS church has nearly three million members in the United States and about 800,000 overseas. It boasts 25,000 fulltime, self-supporting missionaries who serve for two years. Its far-flung holdings are estimated to be worth billions of dollars (the church stopped issuing financial reports in 1958). An Associated Press study a year and a half ago estimated annual income at more than $1 billion. It operated at that time eleven radio and television stations in seven major U.S. markets, it owned many businesses in Utah, and its holdings included $18.3 million worth of stock in the Times-Mirror Corporation, which publishes the Los Angeles Times. It recently built across the street from its Salt Lake City temple a 28-story, $33 million church administration building that dominates the city’s skyline.

Church officials are concerned about the growing numbers of “jack Mormons,” the dropouts no longer seriously pursuing the faith. An increasing number of intellectuals are among them. Dissidents are unhappy about the church’s views of blacks (the church believes in progressive revelation, so the president, Spencer W. Kimball, could conceivably announce a divinely ordered adjustment in doctrine and practice). One of the three California researchers, Wayne Cowdrey, is a direct descendent of Oliver Cowdery, Joseph Smith’s trusted aide. He left the church as a result of his research into the origins of the Book of Mormon.

And then there is the chipping away at the foundations. For example, one of the church’s respected scholars, Egyptologist Dee Jay Nelson, was asked in 1968 to translate the then newly discovered Joseph Smith Papyri fragments, dating from 100 A.D. or earlier. They purportedly had been the basis for the Book of Abraham in Smith’s Pearl of Great Price. Some of the fragments were glued to heavy paper with hand-written notations on the back linking them unmistakably to Smith. Nelson discovered that the text was part of an ancient pagan ritual of death and not what Smith had “translated” in the Book of Abraham. The church refused to publish Nelson’s translation (corroborated by other Egyptologists), and an estrangement began that led him to resign from the LDS in 1975.

“It is not my fault that [the papyri] did not say what Joseph Smith claimed they did,” says Nelson.

The church is slowly discovering that a crisis of truth exists in its roots.

Law For Legislators

If a vote is to be taken on the Ten Commandments, should each law be considered separately or are they all one package?

After some debate, members of the Tennessee Senate decided it would be unwise to cast a separate ballot on each section of the Decalogue. So they approved the whole package. Approval came after the senators defeated motions to table the commandments and to delay approval until next February.

The thirty-three-member legislative body got into a theological discussion before it ended its spring term when members began offering amendments to a code of ethics that had been framed by a committee. The code, described as one of the strongest in the nation, was finally adopted after the Ten Commandments and the Golden Rule were added.

“When Jesus came to earth,” said one senator who did not want to include the commandments in the code, “he abolished the old order.” Another disagreed with the interpretation. One solon reminded his colleagues, “There has been only one person in history who has been able to live up to the Ten Commandments.”

Then a veteran politician warned the Senate, “If you take out the Ten Commandments and the rest of it, I don’t believe a man here can be re-elected.” Faced with the prospect of having constituents misunderstand their negative votes, the members of the upper house then approved the code, with commandments.

Trouble in the Kirk

A student poster pinned up in the hall made its own commentary on the recent Church of Scotland general assembly: “When all is said and done—there is a lot more said than done.”

What was said—and seen—was nonetheless often memorable. In her jubilee year Queen Elizabeth paid the third visit of her reign to the Kirk assembly, and duly told the 1,300 commissioners of her intention to maintain Presbyterian church government in Scotland. The Queen is known to be worried about separatist tendencies among Scottish Nationalists, and must have been reassured when the assembly broke out into a Jacobite song written originally about Bonnie Prince Charlie: “Will ye no’ come back again?”

At a later session a former moderator, George Reid, firmly grasped the nettle. The English, he said, had at times shown an extraordinary ignorance about Scotland—the sort of thing that could turn moderates into extremists. He proposed that the assembly urge the government to hold a referendum to learn the wishes of Scottish people on devolution. The assembly agreed.

It was more divided when it resumed last year’s controversial debate on second baptism (see June 18, 1976, issue, page 31). Still shying away from facing up to the theological issues, officialdom astonishingly suggested that those who insist on going through a form of second baptism should be advised to consider joining the Baptists. Clergyman W. Wallace of Wick said that when people joined the Kirk they took vows that make no reference to any particular form of baptism. “The integrity of the church is very much in doubt,” he declared, “if we get people to take [such vows] and then ask them to leave the church because of the small print we have dug up somewhere.” The official reply that a guideline, not a regulation, was under discussion likewise astonishingly convinced a majority. More will be heard of this matter, for a number of the Kirk’s ministers have admitted to having been rebaptized.

An even more serious issue was raised by the retiring moderator, T. F. Torrance, when he pointed out that there are some three million people in Scotland who belong to no church. They are not hostile to the Kirk, he said, but hungry for the Spirit and Word of God. “We need to match the opportunity with a new vision of mission,” he declared. (The assembly later endorsed a call for a new campaign of evangelism throughout Scotland.)

Reports revealed that membership of the Church of Scotland fell over the past year by some 22,000 and now stands at 1,019,961—one-fifth of Scotland’s population whereas in 1952 it was one-fourth. (Scotland’s Roman Catholics now number 814,000). Average giving was 35p (65 cents) a week, and the Kirk appears to be heading for deep financial trouble; the equivalent of $30 million will be needed for 1978, $5 million more than in 1977. Sales of the Kirk’s magazine Life and Work dropped to 133,000 (it is still the biggest-selling religious periodical in Britain).

Another report indicated that unity talks with four smaller, more conservative Presbyterian bodies had failed to find ways to establish closer relationships.

Other distinguished visitors to the assembly included Cardinal Gordon Gray, leader of Scotland’s rapidly growing Catholics, and Donald Coggan, archbishop of Canterbury. In the course of a deeply spiritual address, Coggan made a tentative appeal for restoring talks between the two national churches—and was immediately criticized in some quarters of the 44,000-member Episcopal Church in Scotland.

The most moving feature of the assembly was a contribution by a minister who is dying of cancer. The clergyman, Gordon Riddell, had not intended to speak, but he found a pro-euthanasia motion was being discussed academically and felt compelled to give an inside view. Stuffed with pain-killer (his own expression), the 60-year-old minister from a Shetland Islands parish told his story dispassionately. He had gone through several crises in his battle against cancer, he admitted, but there were “two simple reasons why I hold no truck with euthanasia.” He told the packed assembly what they were. “I feel that in my calling as a minister of God I must set a proper example … to others … who rightly look to the church for leadership in this very difficult dilemma. I have invariably found in these great crises of pain—if they are faced up to as best one can in prayer and faith—there is this surprising paradox that there comes within the next hour or two a great experience of spiritual uplift of a kind you have never known before. Compared with that experience, any comfort … offered by some form of euthanasia is very much second best.” The motion against which he spoke was overwhelmingly rejected.

A decision on whether to receive an overture calling for a review of the office of moderator produced a tied vote and was withdrawn before the present incumbent of the chair was put in the invidious position of having to use a casting vote. There was more in this than met the eye. Presbyterians have always been proud of adhering to the principle of parity of ministers, but the retiring moderator had, among other things, accepted an invitation by a government minister to join in talks with “church leaders” of other denominations. Presbyterianism knows “no such animal,” complained another former moderator.

The assembly also:

• Decided by a five-vote majority to exhort members to abstain from all forms of gambling, including raffles in aid of church funds.

• Sent down to presbyteries for comment a proposed plan of union with Scotland’s 11,000 Methodists.

• Elected as moderator clergyman John R. Gray of Dunblane Cathedral.

J. D. DOUGLAS

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