The Documentary Hypothesis

The Book of Mormon’s candor about its own making is at odds with the prevailing sense of how scriptures came to be. Most Christians in 1830 thought that the Bible, which the Book of Mormon devotedly emulates, had been composed by pure inspiration. They assumed that words came to prophets in the manner described by the ancient Jewish philosopher Philo, who believed that prophets “proffer nothing of their own, but matter altogether foreign to themselves, and communicated to them internally by the operation of God. So long as the state of a prophet be rapture, he knows nothing of himself.” Scripture was purely God’s word, unsullied by human thought. The Book of Mormon was compiled in another way. Mormon selected and blended materials from various plates, making editorial decisions all along the line. Scripture emerged from his work as an editor, extracting the history from his sources, much like other historians.

This unconventional view had relevance in 1830. This was a time when the problems of constructing the Bible were of growing interest to Christian scholars. In the century preceding the publication of the Book of Mormon, scrutiny of the Bible had made the text seem more like a history than the privileged word of God. This movement toward the historicization of biblical texts came primarily from Germany where scholars were emphasizing the human influences on the production of the scriptures. They argued that to understand the composition of biblical texts readers had to grasp the historical conditions under which they emerged, in the process of humanizing scripture-making. American scholars were bringing back this new biblical scholarship just as Joseph Smith was translating the gold plates.

In some instances, this turn toward history had startling consequences. As scholars considered biblical texts as products of their times and places, they began to wonder who had written them. How did they come to be? It was less disruptive to direct this line of reasoning at classical text: were Homeric epics written by one man, a person named Homer, or were they a composite production, perhaps by a group of authors or bards? Querying the authorship of classical texts, however, led inexorably to questions about Isaiah and the Pentateuch. Were they truly what they claimed to be, the inspired writings of the prophet whose name they ore, or were they composite works shaped by nameless editors too?

Scholars who investigated such questions soon found themselves in contested territory. Tampering with holy write aroused the fears of the orthodox who, as one scholar puts it, were accustomed to “the merely theological use of the Scriptures of the Old Testament.” The scriptures “were searched only for religious ideas, and men remained blind to their other contents.” The consideration of the Bible’s place in history disturbed the traditional reading.

The German biblical scholar Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) began as a defender of the standard view of biblical infallibility, but later underwent a “mental crisis” and came to see that the texts had been altered over time. By adopting a historical perspective, he identified distinctive qualities in each of the New Testament books, undermining the basic assumption that the Bible was a unified, inspired whole.

Subsequent scholars such as Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1652-1827), a student and admirer of Michaelis, saw individual texts as blends of previous texts. In his Einleitung in das Alte Testament (Introduction to the Old Testament), published in 1780-1783, Eichhorn proposed that the books of the Old Testament, as a modern historian writes, did not come to us “as one piece from the hand of their authors. Sometimes the authors themselves, later disciples or collectors put fragmented parts together.” Eichhorn thought that this should not be too difficult to accept. “Supposing the Mosaical books in their present disposition not to be the work of Moses, still they are composed of Mosaical materials, merely put into form by a later hand.” Eichhorn felt he was defending the Bible against its despisers, but others found him dangerously subversive in “trifling with the most sacred subjects.” Conservatives later saw these years as “the period at which the great revolution in the opinions and mode of study of the theologians” occurred.

American scholars who studied in Germany or read the scholarship were impressed with the new learning but realized that American audiences could not bear the disturbing implications. Most of the American clergy based their thinking on the traditional Protestant doctrine of biblical infallibility, which insisted that the books of the Bible were the impeccable word of God. Historicizing them threw their veracity into question and eroded the foundations of Christian belief.

Anxiety about fallible human influence on scripture-making was absent from the Book of Mormon. A book whose origins were enshrouded in miraculous events was surprisingly at east with historical influences on the actual production of scripture. Although Joseph Smith had known connections with German biblical scholarship, his translation depicted scripture as emerging from specific historical circumstances and consisting of texts stitched together by a later editor much as the German scholars envisioned the origins of the Bible. While the text of the Book of Mormon insists on its privileges as inspired writing, readers of the Book of Mormon are permitted to view the very human process by which the text came into existence. It was a conglomeration of texts just as the new critics claimed the Bible was. Mormon, the general editor, took pains to explain exactly where the various elements of his book came from, making clear that the Book of Mormon consisted of the writings of various prophets and leaders going back through the time and recorded on various plates. The book does not even shy away from the possibility of human errors creeping into the text. The Book of Mormon’s title page warns that “if there be fault, it be the mistake of men,” pretty much summing up the Unitarian view of hoy writ.

The Book of Mormon and the higher criticism both returned scripture to history. The essence of the German critical approach was to imagine biblical authors as writers grounded in concrete cultural and historical circumstances. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Bible critics read the book as they would any historical document, discerning the influences of its time and its production. Book of Mormon writers followed the same pattern. In the book’s pages, the scriptures are a human production: minds writing under heavenly influence but in particular historical circumstances, diligently inscribing events and inspiration on plates made by human hands.

Alike as humanistic scholarship and the Book of Mormon were, however, the two actually pointed in opposite directions. If the thrust of German scholarship was to turn holy scripture into human history, the Book of Mormon did the reverse: it turned history into holy writ. The biblical critics said little about how texts edited, blended, and revised by human editors rose to be treated as the word of God. The Book of Mormon offers itself as an example of that elevation. It reveals how a record kept as history was in time transmuted into scripture.