Figure 45. Sources and influences in the construction of the Book of Mormon. [A chart suggesting how Joseph Smith received the Spaulding manuscript from Sidney Rigdon. Includes word-clouds of other suggested influences on the Book of Mormon: King James Bible, Restorationism, Professor John Smith, Dartmouth Lectures, Athanasius Kircher, a magical worldview, View of the Hebrews, Arminianism, Mound-builder mythology, Royal Arch Masonry, Apocrypha, the Quran, and others.]

In addition to being a heat map for potential sources and influences, Figure 45 also aspires to be a relatively complete, single-slide, process-flow diagram for how the Book of Mormon came to pass. The red lines therein show how manuscripts passed from person to person, starting with Professor John Smith, who was both a source and an influence for Spalding. In all likelihood, Professor Smith composed the D text sometime before 1787 and handed it over to Spalding just as he left Dartmouth. I suspect that Spalding worked on the novel here and there while serving as a roving missionary; however, he probably set it aside after becoming an atheist. After receiving word of Professor Smith’s death in 1809, he finally decided to finish it. Under KsPv1.0, Spalding honored both the structure and the purpose that Professor Smith had conceived, but, now that he was gone, Spalding let himself infuse into his heretical novel additional elements of the burlesque, the picaresque, the humoresque, and even the grotesque (e.g., Shiz getting up and struggling for breath after his own head was cut off). Between 1809 and 1816, Spalding composed rough drafts, polished drafts, and maybe even a printer’s manuscript that encompassed the Fabius-Yankee story (F), the Nephi-Mormon story (N), the Jaredite-Ether story (J), and the Moses-Enoch story (M). In 1813 he shared some rough drafts with the Patterson bookshop, which were returned to Spalding. According to one account, Spalding may have shown one or more polished manuscripts to the Patterson brothers in 1815. Regardless of whether he did, his widow took all of his writings to the Pattersons after he died in 1816. There, a polished copy of Stories from Lost Manuscripts Found seems to have languished for many years. Then, after the bookshop’s liquidation, it legitimately fell into the hands of Rigdon, who subsequently mistook Spalding’s manuscript for genuine, ancient American scripture. After piously asking for “revelations” about Christianity in ancient America, Rigdon wrote down his impressions, which, for the sake of nomenclature, I will call R1. As if he were composing the Gospel of Matthew based on the Gospel of Mark, Rigdon incorporated his R1 writings into the source text itself, affording R2, which he later copied for Smith as R3. As early as possible in 1825, the first shipment (R3a) was sent to Smith, with either Rigdon or Pratt serving as the courier. Without delay, Smith started dictating to Harris, thus producing the H text, which was promptly lost or destroyed by his wife, Lucy. After much prayer and fasting, Rigdon felt inspired to finish R3b (up through Mormon 8) before attempting to solve the lost-pages problem. When he was done with R3b, Rigdon focused on augmenting the Book of Ether with more of his own revelations (R4), which is when he shifted from therefore—consciously or subconsciously—influenced by Spalding having done so or not. After that, he rewrote the lost 116 pages by envisioning the “small Plates” of Nephi and thereafter telling the same story, just a little differently (R5). Finally Rigdon compiled his afterthoughts and generated R6, which comprises both the Book of Moroni (the last book within The Book of Mormon) and the Title Page. As early as possible in 1829 a second shipment of manuscripts containing R1, R2, R3, and R5 was sent to Smith—again with either Rigdon or Pratt serving as the courier. Living once again on the Isaac Hale farm, Smith almost immediately started dictating (or sometimes reading) these manuscripts to Cowdery from behind a hanging curtain and often from a different room, which was much faster than the highly performative memorization-dictation process that he had used with Harris the year before. Under this scenario, possibly Smith reserved the dictation of R5 to the very end (after having moved to the Whitmer farm) all the while hoping that somehow the lost 116 pages would turn up, thus explaining the complicated “wherefore” pattern in the middle of Figure 42. Cowdery completed and compiled the C manuscript no later than the first week of July 1829, after which he leisurely took the next eight months to fully recopy it, thus affording the printer’s manuscript (P).

Now let us return to the rest of Smith’s story. At the end of Chapter 18 we left him with a soul-searching question: did he honestly believe—or could he make himself believe—that God might have chosen him (with his gift of second sight) to have some role in the latter-day restoration of Rigdon’s Church of Christ? Having never found anything of value in any of his digs, Smith had to admit that all the evidence was to the contrary. Mathematically speaking, it would take a tremendous amount of faith to overtake the simplest and most obvious explanation: that Rigdon’s manuscript was nothing more than a mere human production—an elaborated work of Bible-based fan fiction. But perhaps modern-day Mormons are justified in believing that the faith of Joseph Smith was truly the greatest in all of human history. I’d really like to see his spreadsheet. Regardless of whether Smith had even a modicum of faith (in Christ, in Rigdon, or in Nephi’s plates) as he sat on the steamboat headed for Buffalo and then stood on the packet boat bound for Palmyra, one thing was for sure. In himself and in time, the quintessential confidence man would have more than enough.