To establish any connection at all between the books of the two Smiths it is absolutely imperative to find something perfectly unique and peculiar in both of them. Yet there is not one single thing in common between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon that is not also found in the Bible. Parallel No. 9 promises to be the exception to this containing as it does significant details that are not found in the Bible: yet it is in these very details that the two books are in complete disagreement! Another false parallel is No. 10, the destruction of Jerusalem: Ethan Smith speaks of one destruction, the Book of Mormon of another, but the Bible speaks of both. Here the parallel is not between the two Smiths at all— they are talking of wholly different events— but between them and the Bible only. Again, there is an indirect reference to American hieroglyphics in Ethan Smith which leads to parallel No. 8 with the query: "Was this sufficient to suggest the strange manner of writing in the Book of Mormon in the 'learning of the Jews and language of the Egyptians' but in altered Egyptian?" In other words, the two sources have the mention of Egyptian hieroglyphics in common:— only the word Egyptian does not appear in Ethan Smith; and the word hieroglyphics does not appear in the Book of Mormon; but if you put the two together, what do you get? Egyptian hieroglyphics! In the same way, Ethan Smith contains a brief mention of Quetzalcoatl, though nothing could be farther from his mind than to suggest that Quetzalcoatl might be Christ, while the Book of Mormon contains mention of Christ without the slightest hint that he might be Quetzalcoatl: put them together, and you have parallel No. 18: The common teaching of both books that Christ was Quetzalcoatl! Again, because Joseph Smith (not the Book of Mormon) and Ethan Smith both mention Ezekiel 37, our critics are convinced that the former is stealing from the latter, though their interpretations of the celebrated passage are entirely different: it is suspicious for Joseph Smith even to mention a universally discussed chapter of the Bible if Ethan Smith has already mentioned it.

Finally parallel No. 12: Granted that the Indians are the descendants of the lost ten tribes, as everyone believed in 1830, what Christian would not feel an obligation towards them? Ethan Smith's view that "the American Gentile nation [the United States]" should "become the Savior of Israel in America," is a perfectly natural one, and is assumed to offer another parallel to the teaching of the Book of Mormon. Nothing could be farther from the mark: the Book of Mormon never looks to the United States government, the American people, or Christian civilization to save the Indians— it tells a very different story of what is to happen.

So after all Ethan Smith turns in a perfect score; not a single blemish mars the target. In every case where the Book of Mormon might have borrowed from him, it might much more easily have borrowed from the Bible or prevailing popular beliefs. In the few cases where he deals in common with the Book of Mormon with matters not treated in those other sources, the two books are completely at variance.