Brigham Henry Roberts (1857-1933) developed the primary apologetic arguments used to defend the antiquity of the Book of Mormon, a book most Latter-day Saints believe narrates the story of the ancestors of the American Indian. While speaking to the church as a general authority, Roberts addressed the book as an ancient record; privately, however, he voiced doubts. In the last twelve years of his life, he encountered questions about Book of Mormon language, archeology, and geography that he could not answer. As he reexamined his earlier writings on the subject, he turned to his colleagues with two critical treatises that asked whether the prophet had created a “wonder tale” which, “I sorrowfully submit, points to Joseph Smith” as its author. He expressed his public faith and private doubts to the end of his life.

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Although Roberts fulfilled his formal duty to answer Couch’s questions, his own concerns were far from resolved. As he had requested, President Grant approved a committee composed of the most articulate Mormon leaders—Ivins, Talmage, Widtsoe, and Roberts—to further study these questions. In his journal, Talmage noted attendance at meetings through the spring of 1922 in James H. Moyle’s home but provided no details. Roberts reported to Lloyd that “they met and looked vacantly at one and other, but none seemed to know what to do about it.”

To summarize the first part of his study, Roberts argued that the following similarities between the Book of Mormon and A View of the Hebrews suggested that the latter served as a structural outline for the former:

1. Both books maintain that American Indians descended from ancient Hebrew tribes; Ethan Smith wrote that they descended from

the Lost Ten Tribes, whereas Joseph Smith limited American Indian ancestry to two Hebrew families, headed by Lehi and Ishmael.

2. Both open with references to the destruction of Jerusalem.

3. Both tell of inspired prophets among ancient Americans.

4. Both quote extensively and nearly exclusively from Isaiah.

5. Both describe ancient Americans as a highly civilized people.

6. Both announce the mission of the American nation in the last days to gather these remnants of the House of Israel and bring them to Christianity, thereby hastening the advent of the Millennium predicted in the Bible.

7. Both mention the “stick of Joseph” and the “stick of Ephraim,” which Ethan Smith used to symbolize the Jews and the lost tribes; Joseph Smith advertised the Book of Mormon as “the stick of Joseph taken from the hand of Ephraim.”

8. Both refer to the ancient Urim and Thummim, which Joseph Smith used to translate the Book of Mormon.

9. Both Smiths referred to Quetzalcoatl, the legendary, white bearded Aztec god. Ethan Smith described him as “a type of Christ,” but Joseph Smith saw in the legend evidence that Christ himself had come to the New World.”

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Roberts told colleagues he had written “A Book of Mormon Study” “from the viewpoint of an open mind, investigating the facts of the Book of Mormon origin and authorship.” In his cover letter he said “that what is herein set forth does not represent any conclusions of mine”—emphasizing the preliminary nature of his research and tending to diminish his role as messenger, thus focusing on the issues which he thought should be considered on their own merits. Some LDS writers have asserted that Roberts played devil’s advocate to stimulate discussion only, and they therefore dismiss as academic exercises the archeological difficulties Roberts found in the Book of Mormon. His work was private and never meant to be published, they suggest. In short, Roberts did not believe anything he wrote. Roberts once declared, “If I have caused you to doubt my faith … let me reaffirm it.” Someone reportedly heard Roberts say in 1933 that “Ethan Smith played no part in the formation of the Book of Mormon.”

In fact, from 1921 to 1933, Roberts continued to defend the church in public meetings and newspapers. After he completed his “Book of Mormon Study,” he asserted in the tract, Why Mormonism (May 1922): “The existence of this American Volume of Scripture was revealed to Joseph Smith… You Reader may know by the power of the Holy Ghost that this Witness to the Deity of the Christ is true, if you will seek that testimony in the way prescribed.” A year later, just after he had hand-dated his cover letter to “A Book of Mormon Study,” he asserted in an LDS general conference talk: “The Book of Mormon [is] the word of God to the ancient inhabitants of this land of America.” Later that year, in an address to the October 1923 conference, he said: “The great outstanding thing in the Book of Mormon is the fact of the visit of the Redeemer to the inhabitants of this western world … These things being true, makes the advent of the Book of Mormon into the world the greatest literary event of the world.”51 Yet Roberts’s provocative questions speak for themselves.

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We find two images of Roberts in such passages: faithful in public; questioning, even skeptical, in private. Roberts’s critiques of the Book of Mormon were not published during his lifetime; one critique may not even have been delivered to its intended recipients. They were kept private, perhaps because they may have been regarded as damaging to the faith. Whatever ambivalence or difficulty he may have had about putting his questions before the public, Roberts nevertheless persisted in researching and discussing them with his peers in church leadership. He said he had written “A Book of Mormon Study” “for presentation to the Twelve and the Presidency, not for publication, but I suspended submission of it until I returned home” in 1927 from his mission presidency; “I have not yet succeeded in making the presentation of it, although the letter of submission to President Grant was made previous to leaving the E[astern] S[tates] M[ission]. I have made one feeble effort to get it to them since returning home, but they are not in a studious mood.”

When he returned in 1927, he wrote a fourth letter, this time to Apostle Richard R. Lyman on 24 October. The letter was accompanied by “A Parallel,” an eighteen-page condensation of the similarities between the Book of Mormon and A View of the Hebrews. Roberts wanted Lyman to present the summary to the Council of Twelve, perhaps to see how the longer work he had written five years earlier might be received. There is no evidence that Roberts’s questions were discussed in further council meetings, although Roberts may have delivered a copy of the longer “Study,” along with the “Parallel,” to Lyman. The cover letter refers to both the eighteen-page “Parallel” and a lengthy work: “Necessarily the matter presented is rather large in volume, but I hope its interest will excuse its length.” If Lyman received the “Study,” it is unclear if he passed it on to any of the church councils. Five years later Roberts indicated that he “had not yet succeeded in making the presentation of it.”

The letter Roberts wrote to accompany “A Parallel” was informal. Lyman was apparently a close friend. Recalling Lyman’s “considerable interest” during his presentation to the council in 1922, Roberts now sent him “a possible theory of the Origin of the Book of Mormon … which in the hands of [a] skillful opponent could be made, in my judgment, very embarrassing.” Roberts noted that in Rochester in 1824, “six years before the publication of the Book of Mormon and within 20 miles of Palmyra,” Josiah Priest published The Wonders of Nature and Providence, which quoted extensively from View of the Hebrews. Roberts warned Lyman that questions may arise some day about the “origin of the Book of Mormon”—if Ethan Smith’s book supplied the “structural outline and some of the subject matter of the alleged Nephite record.”

ROBERTS’S SILENCE

Little more was heard of Roberts’s first two critical works for the next half century. However, ten years after he presented Apostle Lyman with a summary of “parallels” between the Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews, copies were privately circulated in the Mormon community. Elsie Talmage Brandley, daughter of James E. Talmage, gave a copy to Newel K. Young, a member of the church’s General Board of Religion Classes and a grandson of Lorenzo Dow Young, younger brother of Brigham Young. Newel, in turn, shared copies with other interested parties, including Sterling M. McMurrin. Since that time, historians and apologists have debated the import of Roberts’s comparison. In a 22 July 1939 letter to Ariel L. Crowley, B. H. Roberts’s son, Benjamin E., wrote that his father “found nothing in his study which reflected upon the integrity of Joseph Smith’s account of the Book of Mormon.” Six years later in 1945, Fawn Brodie described Roberts’s list of parallels in her biography of Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History. The next year Benjamin Roberts publicly discussed his father’s research and distributed copies of his father’s “A Parallel.” Neither of these discussions mentioned Roberts’s 1921 and 1922 studies.

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Roberts served in the innermost circles of the church. His later critiques of the Book of Mormon are impressive in part because he wrote for insiders and not for publication. They clearly represent his private thoughts and conscience. Some insist that Roberts was primarily a defender of the faith. Others say that after 1921, he questioned Mormon beliefs and lost his faith. Whether this defender of the Book of Mormon came to doubt the book’s authenticity is an important question in assessing Mormonism’s historical claims.

Attempting to soften the force of Roberts’s questions, apologists Truman G. Madsen and John W. Welch emphasize his continued assertions of faith and his never having stepped down from church leadership. Following Madsen’s and Welch’s lead, Daniel Peterson argues that, “Clearly, B. H. Roberts should not have fallen into serious doubt over five questions such as these,” referring to the questions raised by Couch. Peterson believes that Roberts never “explicitly declared his supposed loss of belief’ but “continued to testify to the truth of the Book of Mormon right up to his death.” Mormon historian Davis Bitton recently reiterated that Roberts’s attempts to address these five questions in “three different pieces of manuscript [were] not intended for publication.” Wanting to conclude that Roberts “only meant that he was willing to look at every possible challenge while maintaining his longtime convictions,” former assistant church historian James Allen looks for inaccuracies in Roberts’s “unclear” memory or Lloyd’s “misunderstanding of what was said.” But Roberts’s “disappointment” that his brethren would not take his concerns more seriously does not make sense unless Roberts took them seriously himself. In recollections reported by Madsen about fifty years after the fact, one of Roberts’s former Eastern States missionaries remembered that Roberts often said, “I have come to know the book is true.” But Roberts’s own words leave room for another interpretation. A reading of the critical writings in 1925 led one BYU faculty member to conclude that Roberts had come very close to calling Joseph Smith “a fraud and deceit.”

Several missionaries and associates of Roberts recalled a change of heart on the Book of Mormon. Mark K. Allen, secretary to the Eastern States Mission presidency after Roberts, remembered his saying: “We’re not through with the Book of Mormon. We’ve got problems. I could do Volume III of New Witnesses for God the other way and be just as convincing.” Another missionary in the Eastern States under Roberts remarked that he recommended that missionaries not talk about the Book of Mormon, that Roberts had instructed him “to use the Bible, to approach converts in their own language and avoid the criticism that so often arose from using the Book of Mormon.” In Roberts’s last years, at least publicly, he continued to voice support for the Book of Mormon, remarking in his last general conference address: “The Book of Mormon [is] one of the most valuable books that has ever been preserved, even as holy scripture.”

A month before his death, Roberts spoke perhaps for the last time about the historicity of the Book of Mormon. Wesley Lloyd spent three and one-half hours with Roberts on 7 August 1933 and dictated an account of their conversation to his wife, who wrote it in Wesley’s personal journal. Roberts related the contradictions that James Couch had seen in the Book of Mormon and told Lloyd that after he asked President Grant and the council in January 1922 for help with these problems, the church leadership had been unresponsive. But Roberts continued his interest in these issues: “[Roberts] swings to a psychological explanation of the Book of Mormon and shows that the plates were not objective but subjective with Joseph Smith, that his exceptional imagination qualified him psychologically for the experience which he had in presenting to the world the Book of Mormon and that the plates with the Urim and Thummim were not objective.” Roberts also

explained certain literary difficulties in the Book such as the miraculous incident of the entire nation of the Jaredites, the dramatic story of one man being left on each side, and one of them finally being slain, also the New England flat hill surroundings … that the entire story [is] laid in a New England flat hill surrounding. These are some of the things which has made Bro. Roberts shift his base on the Book of Mormon.

These are sobering reflections for the great defender of the Mormon faith to come to at the end of his life.

CONCLUSION

During the last twelve years of his life, Roberts spoke with two voices regarding the Book of Mormon. When he could not come up with answers to his questions, he did not find it necessary to abandon his role as a general authority, nor to renounce his faith. But he did share his concerns with colleagues and friends. Fellow defender of the faith Thomas Ferguson followed a similar path after decades of disappointing archeological research. Ferguson would express private views that contrasted with his public pronouncements. Likewise, Roberts said in private that Joseph Smith, a “young” and “imaginative” prophet, produced a work of parable rather than history. Even as Roberts bore his testimony from the pulpit, he drew upon issues of archeology and textual criticism to ask his colleagues to address intractable challenges to the Nephite record.

What significance is there to this dichotomy? That such issues were raised, albeit cautiously, within the highest quorums of the church evokes questions of widespread misgivings about the Book of Mormon within the larger, general membership. Just as we all try to balance our hopes and fears as we confront unfulfilled wishes, more than a few private doubters and public believers must personally share Roberts’s questions about the keystone document of their faith. Unfortunately, the taboo against questioning prevents frank discussion of this revered work, although church members, if they were asked, would probably acknowledge that their belief in the Book of Mormon is not measured by the way they view history in general. So, would they benefit from taking Roberts’s lead in confronting these questions directly and honestly and attempting to resolve them? Just as the question of historicity held enough merit to be considered by someone known in the church to be the greatest defender of the Book of Mormon, that example may be reason enough to continue such an important inquiry.