The most commonly cited possible source for the Book of Mormon other than the KJV Bible is View of the Hebrews, published in 1823 by a pastor named Ethan Smith (no relation) in Poultney, Vermont. Since Oliver Cowdery lived for several years of his childhood in Poultney, he may have been Joseph Smith's connection to the book, although there is no hard evidence of Cowdery and Smith meeting before 1829 (when the general subject matter of the Book of Mormon was already established). B. H. Roberts, a noted Mormon leader and scholar, wrote a manuscript in 1927 listing eighteen parallels between the Book of Mormon and View of the Hebrews. This manuscript was part of a larger project in which Roberts addressed with unusual frankness many difficulties with the Book of Mormon in the hope that these difficulties could be definitively resolved. Ironically, one of the main objections to the argument is that many of the ideas in View of the Hebrews (especially about American Indians being the descendants of Israelites) were circulating widely in Joseph Smith's day. Such an objection may weaken the case for direct dependence on Ethan Smith's book, but it strengthens the case for an early-nineteenth-century origin of the Book of Mormon. LDS scholars have also pointed out numerous ways in which the two books differ from one another-but such an objection is logically invalid since the claim is not that the two books are identical but that one is significantly indebted to the other or at least reflects the same milieu.