QUESTIONS OF AUTHORSHIP

Let us turn our attention from the plates themselves to the book itself. Joseph did not merely claim to produce a book; he actually produced one—and a very long and elaborate one at that. As previously noted, the Book of Mormon is over 250,000 words. We might again wonder: why write such a long book when a much shorter one would do? Putting that question aside, let us consider the content of the book he in fact wrote. Does it seem likely—or even plausible—that it was a work of fraud?

At the beginning, of course, it was simply assumed by critics that Joseph must have written the book himself, from his own imagination. But the simple truth is that from everything we know about the twenty-four-year-old Joseph, it is extremely hard to believe that he was capable of such a feat. Emma’s confidence in his prophethood was in great part based on the fact that the man she married had so little education that he could hardly compose a coherent letter. She had served as his first scribe, and she believed that his ability to dictate for hours and then, after stopping for a meal, “begin at once where he had left off, without either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him” was clear proof that he must have been inspired. “It would have been improbable that a learned man could do this; and for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply impossible.”

There is little room for denying that Joseph had neither the knowledge nor the literary skills to produce a work as long and complicated as the Book of Mormon. As a consequence, critics have long sought to provide an alternative explanation of the book’s origin. Either he was secretly in league with someone else more learned who wrote it for him, or he plagiarized most of the content of the book from one or more other works. Oliver Cowdery has been suggested as a possible conspirator, but he, though a schoolteacher, had only a rudimentary education himself and makes a poor candidate as a ghostwriter. Besides, his writing style was always very florid, while the Book of Mormon is written in a spare and plain style, much more like Joseph’s. The only plausible alternative is Sidney Rigdon, a Campbellite preacher who became an early convert and quickly came to be one of Joseph’s closest associates. Rigdon was well educated, knowledgeable about the scriptures, and a confident leader. The main difficulty with the Rigdon theory, however, is that according to all the evidence, he did not encounter the Book of Mormon until several months after its publication, when the earliest LDS missionaries brought it to Kirtland, Ohio. As a result, critics have been reduced to pure speculation to imagine how Joseph and Sidney might have secretly met several years earlier and conspired to produce the book. Apart from the chronological difficulties, it is hard to imagine that Rigdon, who was clearly a very proud man, would have been willing to allow Joseph to take all the credit for the book. He lived for three decades after the death of Joseph, yet adamantly insisted in later years that he had had nothing to do with the production of the Book of Mormon.

As for Joseph having a hidden source of plagiarism, the earliest suggestion was that the Book of Mormon bore a striking resemblance to an unpublished novel written by a certain Solomon Spalding (or Spaulding), a Congregationalist preacher from Connecticut. Spalding died in 1816, long before the publication of the Book of Mormon in 1830, but Spalding’s brother and others declared years later that the story, called “Manuscript, Found,” contained most of the story of the Book of Mormon, minus the “religious parts.” The chief problem with this theory is that the manuscript of “Manuscript, Found” has never been found. The only such work by Spalding that is still extant is an unfinished, untitled romance that bears only the vaguest similarity to the Book of Mormon, so a fundamental question is whether Spalding actually wrote a second novel, one which bears much greater resemblance to the Book of Mormon but has never been located. In addition, it is not clear how Spalding’s story, never having been published, could have come into the hands of the young Joseph. (Spalding lived in Ohio at the time he wrote it, where he remained until he died. Joseph was never in Ohio until 1831.) Finally, it is hard to believe that the Book of Mormon began as a non-religious historical romance when nearly every verse mentions God, Lord, Christ, faith, or righteousness. The theory has been discarded by most serious critics but continues to resurface—presumably in the hope that the “lost manuscript” will someday be found.

A slightly better candidate for Joseph’s supposed literary thievery is a work by a Reverend Ethan Smith (no relation to Joseph), View of the Hebrews. Although it was originally published in 1823, there is again no evidence that Joseph was familiar with the book until many years later. Nonetheless, critics over the last century have supposed that because it was published in a neighboring state (Vermont) and was in wide circulation, Joseph might have had access to it.

This theory was popularized by a well-known biography of Joseph Smith by Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History (1945). Brodie, who was the niece of David O. McKay, the president of the LDS church at the time, presented a picture of Joseph as an idle young man with a tremendous imagination and a gift for storytelling and a remarkable talent for persuading others to believe the most outlandish things. This skill allowed him to persuade some gullible farmers that he could find underground treasures. According to Brodie’s speculations,

Sometime between 1820 and 1827 it occurred to the youth that he might try to write a history of the Moundbuilders [the early Indians who left large mounds of earth all over the eastern United States], a book that would answer the questions of every farmer with a mound in his pasture. He would not be content with the cheap trickery of the conjurer Walters, with his fake record of Indian treasure, although he might perhaps pretend to have found an ancient document or metal engraving in his digging expeditions. Somewhere he had heard that a history of the Indians had been found in Canada at the base of a hollow tree.

She quotes (though she does not exactly endorse) a hostile source who once related that, beginning with an idle remark to his family about possessing a golden bible, Joseph was amazed at their gullibility when they took him seriously, and he subsequently decided to keep up the pretense.

Perhaps in the beginning Joseph never intended his stories of the golden plates to be taken so seriously, but once the masquerade had begun, there was no point at which he could call a halt. Since his own family believed him . . . why not the world?

Brodie writes with a persuasive style, but it is essential to realize that she puts all sorts of thoughts in Joseph’s head without the slightest evidence to support her conjectures. Note the first sentence quoted above: “Some time between 1820 and 1827 it occurred to the youth that . . .” What kind of source provided her with such insight into Joseph’s thoughts, yet with such a vague chronological reference? None—it is pure inference. In any case, her Joseph simply stumbled awkwardly into his fraud—not maliciously, but merely because he was too embarrassed to admit to his family that he had told a casual fib. So rather than admit a minor fault, he decided to write a six-hundred-page book and dedicate his life to pretending that he was a prophet of God! Out of such inauspicious origins, she suggests, came not only the Book of Mormon but one of the most successful religious movements of the modern world. Just how plausible is such a theory of causation? Ultimately, she seems to suggest, he grew into his role as prophet, in essence believing his own deceit. This presumably explains why everything he did, and every word he spoke or wrote over the course of his life, seems so genuine and sincere.

It is notable that in contrast to her characterization of Joseph as a natural-born con man, Joseph’s family considered him a very serious and truthful young man. According to the later recollections of Joseph’s younger brother William, “Joseph Smith, at the age of seventeen years, with the moral training he had received from strictly pious and religious parents, could not have conceived the idea in his mind of palming off a fabulous story, such as seeing angels, etc. . . . There was not a single member of the family of sufficient age to know right from wrong but what had implicit confidence in the statements made by my brother Joseph concerning his vision and the knowledge he thereby obtained concerning the plates. Father and mother believed him; why should not the children? I suppose if he had told crooked stories about other things, we might have doubted his word about the plates, but Joseph was a truthful boy. That father and mother believed his report and suffered persecution for that belief shows that he was truthful.”

In any case, Brodie rejected the Spalding theory as weak and supported by extremely questionable sources. When Philastus Hurlbut, an excommunicant from the church, searched for and finally discovered Spalding’s manuscript, he discovered to his disappointment that the resemblance between the two books was limited to their both dealing with the question of the ancestors of the Native Americans, and that the two writing styles were utterly different.

But was a somewhat different matter. That work’s primary thesis is that the American View of the Hebrews Indians were of Hebrew origin, and Brodie found it plausible that it could have given Joseph “the idea of writing an Indian history in the first place” (p. 46). It is, of course, undeniable that the two books have that much in common. However, Ethan Smith’s work is a semi-scholarly tome with a clear hypothesis and extensive analysis of biblical passages and supposed anthropological facts about Native Americans marshaled to prove his case, while Joseph’s work was a purely narrative history of the presumed ancestors of the Indians. So it cannot be argued that Joseph actually plagiarized from View of the Hebrews. But assuming that Joseph had read View of the Hebrews, could he have been inspired by it to write his history? Could he have borrowed a few ideas from it? Conceivably, yes; but in reality all the ideas shared by the two books could have been obtained by Joseph from any one of a number of sources. The theory that the American aborigines were descended from the lost tribes of Israel was a common speculation of that time. Numerous books had argued the same, and there was doubtless extensive discussion in Joseph’s surroundings. It was, so to speak, in the air.

It is quite notable, however, that despite the agreement on the general point of the Hebraic origin of the Indians, the specific approaches to this issue in the two books had almost nothing in common. Unlike View of the Hebrews, the Book of Mormon is not an attempt to explain the fate of the ten tribes. The question of what happened to the ten tribes after they were carried away captive to the North following their defeat by the Assyrian Empire in 721 BC is one that has intrigued mankind for many centuries. The notion that the native peoples of North America were descendants from those tribes is only one of many possibilities that have been considered, but one that had become quite well known in Joseph Smith’s America. The Book of Mormon, however, does not really address the question of what happened to the ten tribes, though it does portray the Indians as having a Hebraic origin.

The Book of Mormon, as already noted, is the story of a small group of men and women who escape from the city of Jerusalem a few years before it was conquered by the Babylonians. This event is accurately dated in the book to the early sixth century (six hundred years before Christ). This group migrated down the coast of the Arabian Peninsula, and eventually built a ship that brought them to somewhere in the Americas (the exact location has been the subject of extensive debate). Now it just so happens that Lehi, the patriarch of this family, is briefly described in one verse in the middle of the book as a descendent of Manasseh, one of the early patriarchs in the book of Genesis, whose descendants became one of the ten tribes that were “lost.” So it is technically correct that in the Book of Mormon the Nephites and Lamanites are the descendants of one descendent of one of the lost ten tribes. But the story of Lehi and his family has nothing to do with the lost ten tribes per se, who had been taken captive by the Assyrian Empire and disappeared from history more than a century earlier. Apart from the single reference to Manasseh, the ten tribes are not even mentioned. In other words, the story of the Book of Mormon presupposes a sophisticated understanding of the situation in Israel during this period. Lehi was a descendent of one of the ten tribes, but lived in Jerusalem over one hundred years after the ten tribes were “lost.” Is this a gaffe? Hardly. Instead, it acknowledges the realistic view that while the ten tribes were led en masse away from their own native lands (this was a common practice of the Assyrians toward conquered peoples), some members of those tribes would have remained behind, perhaps because they had interbred with members of the southern kingdom of Judah (comprising the remaining two tribes.) What are the chances that Joseph Smith would have invented, out of thin air, a story with such historical sophistication?

Critics have also argued that Joseph, like Ethan Smith, was concerned to bring the Christian gospel to the Indians. Chapter 4 of View of the Hebrews argues at length that Isaiah and other Old Testament authors prophesied that nations of the West (i.e., America, or possibly Britain) would one day serve to save the tribes of Israel from the savagery and degradation into which they had fallen. One section of the Book of Mormon likewise suggests that the “gentiles” will one day serve God’s purposes in bringing salvation to the “Lamanites.” Notably, the Book of Mormon, like View of the Hebrews, makes extensive use of Isaiah’s writings to show this.

Did Joseph Smith get his ideas from the other Smith? Every reader must decide for him- or herself (after, one would hope, a careful reading of both works!), but I suggest that the theory of plagiarism is implausible when considered in detail. For example, Brodie asserts that “both [books] quoted copiously and almost exclusively from Isaiah.” This statement is accurate with respect to the Book of Mormon, but to describe Ethan Smith’s use of Isaiah as “exclusive” is simply incorrect. He quotes more or less randomly from eight other Old Testament prophets, most notably Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Amos, and Zechariah. Moreover, if Joseph Smith decided to borrow the idea of quoting from the prophecies of Isaiah from View of the Hebrews, he did so in a surprising way. A close comparison shows that in great part the two books quote different passages! One study has calculated that while the Book of Mormon quotes 407 verses from Isaiah, View of the Hebrews uses only 128 verses, but less than half of those 128 verses (56) were also used in the Book of Mormon. It is also worth noting that Ethan Smith places great emphasis on the prophecies of Isaiah 18, which are not mentioned in the Book of Mormon at all.

Most significant of all, I think, is that while each author made a sizeable number of modifications to the language of the King James Version of the Bible, Joseph Smith never made the same changes as Ethan Smith!

The very most one can accurately allege, then, is that Joseph Smith acquired the bare idea of quoting from Isaiah and used some of the same verses. On the other hand, he did not follow Ethan Smith’s alternate translations, he used numerous verses that were not in View of the Hebrews, he omitted many verses that were used in the other volume, and he never quoted any of the other prophets that Ethan Smith repeatedly cited.

In other words, the conclusion that we would have to draw to make the case for borrowing is that Joseph read View of the Hebrews, noticed the connection between Isaiah and the American Indians, and decided to do the same himself. But rather than simply quote the same verses of Scripture, he would have had to study the verses quoted in that book, and then study at great length the rest of the book of Isaiah and find a large number of relevant verses that Ethan Smith happened to miss. Keep in mind that most readers find the book of Isaiah one of the most challenging books in the Hebrew Bible to understand, and Joseph would have had, at most, perhaps one biblical commentary and none of the other tools that modern scholars have at their disposal to assist him in sorting through the book and finding passages that would suit his purposes. It seems to me that he would have had to exercise superhuman restraint in not using the many verses that the other book does cite.

This would be true also for a large number of other details from View of the Hebrews. How many of us, if we were trying to write a long, detailed narrative of Hebrew immigrants to the Americas off the top of our heads, having no background at all in the subject but having one scholarly resource in our possession, would be able to resist using a sizeable number of the examples of evidence cited in the one book on the topic we did have? There are simply hundreds of details that Joseph might have borrowed but did not. If we suppose that Joseph had set himself the task of writing a lengthy history of the ancestors of the American Indians, how could he have resisted the temptation to simply crib dozens of details pointed out by Ethan Smith? Instead, according to Brodie, he preferred to invent nearly everything himself. The typical high school student or college freshman is as likely as not, when writing a research paper on some subject they know nothing about, to find roughly three sources and crib from each of them in rotating order. Serious research into dozens of sources takes a great deal of work! Brodie supposed that Joseph simply produced most of the details of the Nephites and Lamanites from his fertile imagination. But apart from the interesting correlations with legitimate ancient sources, try to imagine having as helpful a resource as A View of the Hebrews and then simply ignoring 99 percent of it. Brodie and her followers point out various other details that they suppose he found in Ethan Smith, for example, the presence of iron or steel among the ancient aborigines.

Even if we were to grant that Smith stole a few elements from outside sources, that would still leave, let us say, 98 percent of the content of the book, including the actual words themselves, that Joseph would have had to invent himself. (The actual writing is no small feat, though it is often underappreciated by non-writers, who often suppose that once one has a great idea, the book will practically write itself!) That Joseph, even with a bit of cribbing, could have written such a complex book with perfect consistency is, I still suggest, implausible.

I can’t begin to do justice in this brief space to the huge number of critiques of the Book of Mormon and the complex analyses by its defenders. There are many other examples that could be discussed if I were less solicitous of the reader’s patience. But they tend to follow a common pattern: the critics make accusations that seem plausible at first, especially to casual readers, but careful reading and detailed analysis tend to show that the accusations are at best highly misleading and often quite erroneous.