In the 1920s, Roberts requested and received permission from church president Heber J. Grant to explore more thoroughly a number of issues pertaining to the Book of Mormon. While not published in his lifetime, Roberts’s work circulated in limited form until it was brought together in a comprehensive collection in the mid-1980s. Its appearance created a stir and a difference of opinion among students of Roberts.

Some held, with Brigham Madsen, that Roberts had identified “internal contradictions and other defects” which could suggest that the Book of Mormon “might not be of divine origin.” Madsen and others deduced that Roberts had changed his mind on the traditional view of the book’s origin. Other scholars, equally forcefully, asserted that the important body of public statements by Roberts over the last decade of his life would lead one to a different conclusion.

The question may never be answered conclusively. Yet, anyone assessing Roberts will recognize, along with Brigham Madsen, Roberts’s

fierce independence, his forthright honesty, his deeply imbedded integrity, and above all, his fearless willingness to follow wherever his reason led him. He could be abrasive in his defense of stubbornly held beliefs, but he had the capacity to change his views when confronted with new and persuasive evidence.