8. Roberts as Devil’s Advocate

B. H. Roberts found and in many cases anticipated objections and reductive approaches to the book. He was known to turn the tables on young Mormon missionaries and represent “the case against” with crisp skill, pushing points of vulnerability that tested their mettle. He warned them against superficial response. Most of his colleagues disapproved of such confrontations, but Roberts would say, “You will have a good experience. It will open your eyes and deepen your understanding.”

On 4 and 5 January 1922, B. H. Roberts made an oral presentation before the General Authorities concerning what some critics claimed were anachronisms in the Book of Mormon—the mention of horses, of cimeters or swords, and of silk. These were troublesome to him as well as to the critics. He also presented a lengthy analysis of a tougher problem still—the variety of language dialects in Central and South America, more varied than the time period claimed by the Book of Mormon could account for. The meetings lasted for ten hours on the first day and through the whole day and evening of the second. Elder James E. Talmage, of the Council of the Twelve Apostles recorded that he and others were asked to help Elder Roberts prepare answers, though none were clearly on the horizon. Elder Talmage, nevertheless, predicted in his journal that the Book of Mormon would be vindicated.

Later, in March of 1922, Roberts prepared a draft of a written report to the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve. It included a further discussion of the linguistic problems and other points as well. The study of such books as those of Josiah Priest, Ethan Smith, and others led him to examine such questions as: What literary and historical speculations were abroad in the nineteenth century? Could Joseph Smith have absorbed them in his youth and could these influences have provided the ground plan for such a work as the Book of Mormon? Did Joseph Smith have a mind “sufficiently creative” to have written it? And what internal problems and parallels within the Book of Mormon called for explanation? In confronting such questions Roberts prepared a series of “parallels” with Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews; a summary of this analysis excerpted passages from Ethan Smith’s work and lined them up in columns with comparable ideas in the Book of Mormon. Examination of such questions was contained in a typewritten manuscript entitled “Book of Mormon Study.’’

About this particular study, certain points must be kept in mind if it is not to be gravely misunderstood. First, it was not intended for general dissemination but was to be presented to the General Authorities to identify for them certain criticisms that might be made against the Book of Mormon. In his 1923 letter, Roberts wrote:

Let me say once and for all, so as to avoid what might otherwise call for repeated explanation, that what is herein set forth does not represent any conclusions of mine. This report [is] . . . for the information of those who ought to know everything about it pro and con, as well as that which has been produced against it as that which may be produced against it. I am taking the position that our faith is not only unshaken but unshakable in the Book of Mormon, and therefore we can look without fear upon all that can be said against it.

It is not clear how much of this typewritten report was actually submitted to the First Presidency and the Twelve, but it is clear that it was written for them.

In 1932 Roberts wrote to a missionary who had heard rumors of his work: “I had written it for presentation to the Twelve and the Presidency, not for publication. But I suspended the submission of it until I returned home, but I have not yet succeeded in making the presentation of it.”

Second, the report was not intended to be balanced. A kind of lawyer’s brief of one side of a case written to stimulate discussion in preparation of the defense of a work already accepted as true, the manuscript was anything but a careful presentation of Roberts’s thoughts about the Book of Mormon or of his own convictions.

Third, many of the perceived problems are no longer problems. Roberts himself soon came to realize that the peoples of the Book of Mormon do not represent the only migration that inhabited the Western Hemisphere. So the problem of linguistic variation dissolved. Later scholars would find evidence of cimeters, of silk, and of horses.

Roberts said in 1933 that he had concluded Ethan Smith played no part in the formation of the Book of Mormon. Appreciative of irony, he might well have smiled at the sequel. After his death, ill-wishers published the “parallels” of the book without Elder Roberts’s cover-letter disclaimer. Others have gleefully recited other “problems” as he presented them, seemingly unaware that they were reflecting neither Roberts’s own considered conclusions nor the current state of research. Fawn Brodie wrote in her biography of Joseph Smith that View of the Hebrews “may” have given Joseph Smith the idea of writing the book. While conceding that it “may never be proved” that Joseph ever saw View of the Hebrews, she was confident that “the striking parallelisms between the two books hardly leave a case for mere coincidence.’’ So doing, she unwittingly provided the criteria that validates the Book of Mormon. The “striking parallelisms” between the Book of Mormon and its own claimed historical matrix are far more striking, indeed destroying the case for “mere coincidence,” while such genuine historical parallels do not exist for Ethan Smith’s speculative treatise. Before his death in 1933, Roberts had concluded that the central claims of Joseph Smith and Ethan Smith are not only independent but incompatible.

Roberts felt he had established beyond doubt that there is enough independent evidence for pre-Columbian, Jewish or Hebraic influence on native American races to make the Book of Mormon claims at least credible. The evidence was accumulating rapidly in the last decade of Elder Roberts’s life (it has been an avalanche since), so much so that he told fellow-historian Preston Nibley in 1930 that he wished to call in his New Witnesses volumes and start over. To missionary associates he confided that he hoped to visit Central and South America and there examine firsthand the remnants of ancient middle-American peoples. Most of his work, he admitted, had been as a “compiler,” heavily dependent on secondary sources for his conclusions. Age and declining health dissolved this hope (“How our visions vanish as time rushes upon them,” he wrote in the late 1920s).

Teachers who have used the “Devil’s Advocate” approach to stimulate thought among their students, lawyers who in preparation of their cases have brought up what they consider the points likely to be made by their worthy opponents—all such people will recognize the unfairness of taking such statements out of context and offering them as their own mature, balanced conclusions. For ill-wishers to resurrect Roberts’s similar “Devil’s Advocate” probings is not a service to scholarship, for they are manifestly dated. And it is a travesty to take such working papers as a fair statement of B. H. Roberts’s own appraisal of the Book of Mormon, for, as this paper abundantly demonstrates, his conviction of its truth was unshaken and frequently expressed down to the time of his death.