The Book of Mormon

A Biography

Paul C. Gutjahr

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781400841615
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Denominations

The surprising career of Joseph Smith's famous book Late one night in 1823 Joseph Smith, Jr., was reportedly visited in his family's farmhouse in upstate New York by an angel named Moroni. According to Smith, Moroni told him of a buried stack of gold plates that were inscribed with a history of the Americas' ancient peoples, and which would restore the pure Gospel message as Jesus had delivered it to them. Thus began the unlikely career of the Book of Mormon, the founding text of the Mormon religion, and perhaps the most important sacred text ever to originate in the United States. Here Paul Gutjahr traces the life of this book as it has formed and fractured different strains of Mormonism and transformed religious expression around the world.Gutjahr looks at how the Book of Mormon emerged from the burned-over district of upstate New York, where revivalist preachers, missionaries, and spiritual entrepreneurs of every stripe vied for the loyalty of settlers desperate to scratch a living from the land. He examines how a book that has long been the subject of ridicule—Mark Twain called it "chloroform in print"—has more than 150 million copies in print in more than a hundred languages worldwide. Gutjahr shows how Smith's influential book launched one of the fastest growing new religions on the planet, and has featured in everything from comic books and action figures to feature-length films and an award-winning Broadway musical.

Germination

PART I

Now, we will compare the word unto a seed

[which] may be planted in your heart

—Alma 32:28

Prologue

In 1828, the directors of the twelve-year-old American Bible Society (ABS) set forth the audacious plan to provide every American household with a Bible. In a nation where only twenty years earlier publishers had been hard-pressed to produce two thousand copies of any given book, the ABS exerted its formidable will to undertake a breathtaking mission it named “The General Supply.”¹ Between 1829 and 1831 the ABS published and distributed an astounding half million copies of the scriptures in an attempt to touch the lives of each and every American with the word of God. In this way, the Bible became part of the very foundation of antebellum American print culture.

While the ABS was seeking to bury the country under a mound of Bibles, a young farmer and day laborer named Joseph Smith Jr. was busy with a mound of his own. Claiming angelic guidance, Joseph unearthed a set of golden plates from a hill near his upstate New York home. Joseph would later announce that these were the Plates of Mormon, named after a fourth-century prophet and scribe. Mormon had set down the history of several once-mighty ancient American civilizations by copying, abridging, and adding to the records of scribes who for centuries had recorded the history of these peoples. Especially important for Mormon’s editorial and authorial purposes were the Plates of Nephi (which actually comprised two sets of plates known as the “Small Plates of Nephi” and the “Large Plates of Nephi”) and the Plates of Ether. Through considerable effort and hardship, Joseph translated the “Reformed Egyptian” writing he found on the Plates of Mormon, transforming their message into a new sacred scripture: the Book of Mormon.

Chart of the different sets of plates adapted from “Book of Mormon Plates and Records,” in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1992), 17.

When the Book of Mormon first appeared in 1830, it echoed the Bible in many ways. It was a small, yet imposing, octavo volume containing nearly six hundred pages of text.² Its size and binding style strikingly resembled the most common Bible editions then being passionately produced and distributed by the ABS, and its narrative was full of religious ritual, sacred commandments, and wondrous stories of divine intervention.³

The Book of Mormon differed from the Bible in other ways, offering information found nowhere in the traditional biblical narrative. It tells the story of three family groups who travel from the ancient Middle East to the Americas. A small portion of the book traces the history of Jared and his descendants from their departure after the failure of the Tower of Babel around 2500 BCE to their decline around 300 BCE.⁴ The majority of the book’s content describes the family of Lehi, who left “the land of Jerusalem” around 600 BCE.⁵ This family divides into warring factions named after two of Lehi’s sons: Nephi and Laman. Around 420 CE, the Lamanites destroy the Nephites only to see their own civilization collapse. The few Lamanite survivors will later evolve into various Native American tribes. The last group, led by Mulek, is barely mentioned. It travels to the Americas at roughly the same time as Lehi and eventually merges with the Nephites.

Title page from the first edition of the Book of Mormon (1830), including Joseph Smith Jr.’s identification of himself as the work’s “author and proprietor.” Courtesy Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN

In all, the plates that Joseph used for his translation claimed to offer a historical account that began around the middle of the third millennium BCE and reached up to roughly the fifth century CE. They are named after one of the Nephites’ final scribes, Mormon, who is represented as having done the greater part of the work of writing, editing, and redacting a large collection of records into the set of plates that Joseph later translated. Mormon’s work was completed by his son Moroni, the last known survivor of the once-great Nephite nation. After finishing his work, Moroni buried the plates in what later came to be known as the Hill Cumorah, a prominent point of elevated land near Joseph’s upstate New York home. In the early 1820s, centuries after his death, Moroni appeared to Joseph in angelic form, announcing that God had chosen Joseph to recover and translate the Plates of Mormon so that a new age of revelation might begin on the earth.

One of the most distinctive elements of the Book of Mormon is its Old Testament historical feel coupled with a distinct focus on Jesus Christ, thereby conflating the Christian Bible’s Old and New Testaments. On its title page, the Book of Mormon announces that it exists, in part, to convince “the Jew and Gentile that JESUS is the CHRIST, the ETERNAL GOD, manifesting Himself unto all nations.”⁶ Undergirding this self-proclaimed mandate, the volume records revelations given to the Nephites as early as 600 BCE concerning the birth, life, and sacrificial death of Jesus as the Messiah.⁷ The Book of Mormon’s Christology is complex and detailed. It reaches its fullest manifestation in Jesus appearing to the Nephites after his death and resurrection in the Middle East. Descending from heaven, a man clad in white announces, “I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world.”⁸ The Nephites then bear witness to the spear wound in his side and the nail marks in his hands and feet before Jesus goes on to minister to them by delivering a discourse similar to the Sermon on the Mount, healing their sick, blessing their children, instituting the rite of the Lord’s Supper, and bestowing special authority and power on a chosen twelve. Thus the Christ of the Eastern Hemisphere also becomes the Christ of the Western Hemisphere, a savior to the entire world.⁹

No matter whether one considers the Book of Mormon to be divinely inspired holy writ or the work of one man’s impressive imagination, it is increasingly hard to argue against the growing scholarly consensus that “the Book of Mormon should rank among the great achievements of American literature.”¹⁰ While the book stands as an important artifact in the study of the American history and culture, it is no less important as a contemporary religious text with global influence.¹¹ The book can now be read by nearly 90 percent of the world’s inhabitants in their native languages.¹² Enjoying ever larger print runs in its nearly two-century history, the Book of Mormon achieved a distribution of 150 million copies worldwide by 2011.¹³ Changes in American publishing in the late twentieth century have allowed for exponential growth in producing the Book of Mormon. Computer technology has helped translate the book into dozens of languages and has expedited the printing of more than 50 million copies of the book in the last ten years alone. Such massive publishing statistics lend credence to the religious historian Rodney Stark’s argument that, given the right conditions, by the mid-twenty-first century Mormonism might “achieve a worldwide following comparable to that of Islam, Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, and the other dominant world faiths.”¹⁴ Whether or not Stark’s projection proves correct, it is obvious that the book that gave the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints its popular name might be considered the most important religious text ever to emerge from the United States.

What lies before you is a biography of the Book of Mormon, a study that examines the sacred book’s journey from a small print shop in antebellum Palmyra, New York, through its dozens of editions in English and more than one hundred translations. This book also examines the transformations of the Book of Mormon into other media such as children’s books, comic books, motion pictures, and elaborately staged pageants.¹⁵ Richard Bushman, in his remarkable biography of Joseph Smith Jr., observed that the first edition of the Book of Mormon was an “unusually spare production,” but once released the book quickly took on “a life of its own.”¹⁶ What follows is the story of that life.

Joseph’s Gold Bible

CHAPTER 1

The story of the Book of Mormon cannot be separated from its self-proclaimed “author and proprietor,” Joseph Smith Jr.¹ The fifth child born into the farming family of Joseph and Lucy Mack Smith, Joseph Jr. entered the world two days before Christmas, 1805, in the small town of Sharon, Vermont. In an era when children provided critical labor for a farm’s viability, the Smith family eventually grew to include six sons and three daughters. By the time Joseph was ten, his family had already moved several times, a tortuous migratory pattern that began after Joseph’s father sold his long-established Vermont farm to settle a debt he had incurred speculating on a cargo of ginseng sent to China. In the coming years, the Smith family migrated from one farm to another, drifting ever farther west to cheaper and less developed tracts of land. Eventually relocating to the burgeoning town of Palmyra, New York, Joseph’s father once again attempted to start anew by working his own land and letting his sons out as day laborers.

This image of Joseph Smith Jr. is the standard portrait of the prophet encountered by all who read the most recent missionary editions of the Book of Mormon. Courtesy of the Church Archives, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

In the opening years of the nineteenth century, Palmyra and its surrounding countryside stood on the farthest edge of the nation’s rapidly expanding frontier. From 1790 to 1820, upstate New York grew from roughly 350,000 to nearly 1.4 million inhabitants, and yet for all the promises the region held out to those wishing to make a new life for themselves, uncleared land, harsh weather, and poor roads made farm failure and debilitating poverty ever-present threats.² Complete economic collapse hovered so constantly at the Smith doorstep that Joseph’s father became interested (and got Joseph interested as well) in seeking hidden treasure using divining rods and other magical instruments in vain attempts to gain riches from the earth in ways other than farming. In Palmyra, just as they had done on numerous farms before, the Smiths led difficult and dispiriting lives.

While Joseph Smith Sr. turned to treasure hunting to alleviate his family’s precarious economic situation, Lucy Mack Smith found her solace in religion. She joined the local Presbyterian congregation and encouraged her family to seek comfort and guidance in faith.³ It was a time of particularly fervent religious activity on the New York frontier as the region was filled with all manner of revivalist preachers, missionaries, and other spiritual entrepreneurs. Baptists, Methodists, Quakers, Shakers, Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Universalists all competed for the attention and religious loyalty of people desperate to make a living off land that only a few years before had been largely untouched by the plow.⁴ Palmyra was not immune to the region’s pulsating religious fervor. In 1808 during a Baptist revival, one hundred Palmyrans converted, a number so large that it necessitated the building of a meeting hall for the hamlet’s new believers.⁵

Central to the spiritual vision of many of those wishing to spread the Gospel on New York’s hard-scrabble frontier was the promise that every individual could experience an unmediated and personal relationship with an omnipotent God. Such a relationship was often confirmed through dreams, fits, visions, and trances. While power might be wrested daily from their hands through the acts of relentless rent collectors, heartless shopkeepers, and disreputable land agents, many frontiersmen and women found themselves able to commune with a God who not only cared about their problems but also wielded the power to offer meaningful aid. Those who participated in camp meetings and other religious services took great comfort in the fact that God frequen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Usage
• Part I Germination
• Part II Budding
• Part III Flowering
• Epilogue
• Appendix 1 Notable Book of Mormon Editions in English
• Appendix 2 Book of Mormon Translations
• Notes
• Further Reading
• Index