In the half-century since his death in 1933, many of the countertheories he confronted have simply disappeared or been refuted. But recently the effort by antagonists to reduce the Book of Mormon to the mind of Joseph Smith has taken a new tack. The claim is made (in some anti-Mormon tabloids) that toward the end of his life, B. H. Roberts found insuperable difficulties with the Book of Mormon and even that he lost faith in it.

This mistaken notion arises from an interesting study he undertook by assignment in 1922 and described as “awful”—a scissors and paste compilation of data that began with several linguistic problems that had been brought up by a Mr. Couch of Washington, D.C. (He confronted some of these and still other problems in the third volume of his New Witnesses for God in chapters dealing with “Objections to the Book of Mormon.”) After talking with Elder James E. Talmage and later with Elder Richard R. Lyman, he gathered, under assignment, three sets of material: (1) problems of language and anachronisms; (2) attempts to explain the Book of Mormon in terms of Joseph Smith’s environment or his imaginative mind, or both; and (3) comparison of certain passages in a manuscript by Ethan Smith entitled View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon. Out of this study grew a lengthy manuscript in three basic parts: a 140-page section entitled “Book of Mormon Difficulties”; a 285-page section entitled “A Book of Mormon Study”; and an 18-page document simply called “A Parallel.”

The circumstances surrounding this undertaking are best expressed in his own words. Exactly ten years after this research, on 14 March 1932 (a year and a half before his death), Elder Roberts wrote to his former Eastern States Mission secretary, Elizabeth Skolfield. She had inquired about pre-Book of Mormon theories of the origins of Indians. Elder Roberts wrote:

“I am forwarding you with this mail an introductory chapter to a work of mine which is in typewritten form under the title ‘Book of Mormon Study.’ It makes 435 pages of typewritten matter. It is from research work I did before going to take charge of the Eastern States Mission [in May 1922]. I had written it for presentation to the Twelve and the Presidency, not for publication, but I suspended the submission of it until I returned home, but I have not yet succeeded in making the presentation of it, although a letter of submission was made previous to leaving the E. S. M. [in 1927]. I have made one feeble effort to get it before them since returning home, but they are not in a studious mood.”

From New York, where he was mission president, Elder Roberts had sent the entire 435 pages to President Heber J. Grant and the Quorum of the Twelve on 15 March 1923. In a cover letter, he wrote:

“In writing out this my report to you of those studies, I have written it from the viewpoint of an open mind, investigating the facts of the Book of Mormon origin and authorship. Let me say once 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 herewith submitted is what it purports to be, namely a ‘study of Book of Mormon origins,’ for the information of those who ought to know everything about it pro et con, as well that which has been produced against it, and 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.”

A few years later, after he returned home, Elder Roberts sent a letter to Elder Richard R. Lyman (dated October 24, 1927) in which he wrote, “Such a question as that may possibly arise some day and if it does it would be greatly to the advantage of our future defenders of the faith if they had in hand a thorough digest of the subject matter.”

In these letters and in the manuscript itself one may discern Elder Roberts’s motives in collecting the material and attempting to present it to his brethren. He was anxious to prepare present and future generations for anticipated criticisms. And he was seeking help from those with “greater knowledge” or from “collective wisdom.” He hoped that the Brethren could bolster his own work, which had continued at length. At some points in the manuscript he suggests that earnest prayer on certain matters would be appropriate. After some suggestions, the burden was essentially returned to him and (according to his secretary, Elsa Cook) he did not have opportunity to present all his material orally. “The helpers were very few,” he said, four years before his death, but he had promised further research on these topics, and he had kept his promise.

In sum, B. H. Roberts justified his work and his desire to present it on the ground that “it may be of very great importance since it represents what may be used by some opponent in criticism of the Book of Mormon.”

His study has been used and abused. The anti-Mormon press has cited segments of B. H. Roberts’s writings as unanswerable admissions that the Book of Mormon was a product of the “rather unsophisticated” mind of Joseph Smith.

This is a classic example of a text without a context becoming a pretext—a pretext that has required such shameless tactics as manipulation of dates (in one publication, the date of Elder Roberts’s letter to President Heber J. Grant has even been torn off), suppression of his letter stating that the conclusions expressed in the three manuscripts are not his, and the omission of his statement that he had investigated the questions with the idea that they “may possibly arise some day” and that “future defenders of the faith” should therefore have a “thorough digest” on hand. Above all, critics have been careful not to mention Elder Roberts’s herculean efforts to vindicate the Book of Mormon subsequent to his 1922 study. All this will secure them fame for ingenuity. But what of honesty?

An examination of B. H. Roberts’s Book of Mormon activities, public and private, from 1922 when his “problems” study was complete until his death on 27 September 1933, reveals that every week of every month of those eleven years B. H. Roberts was preparing, writing, presenting, and publishing materials on the Book of Mormon. He delivered hundreds of sermons and wrote dozens of articles and tracts. In the same decade he reprinted many of his books, including additional segments which relate to the Book of Mormon (volume 3 of his New Witnesses series, 1927, and his Comprehensive History of the Church, 1930), and completed his unpublished manuscript “The Truth, the Way, and the Life,” 1931. In addition, a cloud of witnesses, including some three hundred of his full-time missionaries and other close confidants, have left letters and journal accounts of his conversations, his prayers, and his testimonies concerning the book. Only days before diabetes took his life he offered his last charge and testimony to a long-time friend: “You accept Joseph Smith and all of the scriptures.”

Let us here turn to a mere outline of the matters Elder Roberts considered in his 1922 study. He begins by addressing problems of linguistics (fifty-eight pages). The core issue is how to explain the great linguistic variation of the native races of North and South America within the limits of the Book of Mormon chronology. Next he deals with what seems to be some Book of Mormon anachronisms: mention of horses, asses, oxen, sheep, swine, iron and steel (thirty-seven pages). Then he turns to the origin of the native races and their culture (forty-eight pages).

In the second segment of the study, about 170 pages, Elder Roberts poses the question of “literature available to Joseph Smith as a ground plan for the Book of Mormon” and the question of whether Joseph Smith possessed sufficient imagination to produce the Book of Mormon based upon the “common knowledge” folklore of his time. Here he also deals with elements in Ethan Smith’s volume View of the Hebrews, including “miscellaneous” parallels between Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon.

. . .

For the specifics of certain arguments against the Book of Mormon, B. H. Roberts himself had some answers. But serious archaeological, anthropological, and literary studies since his time (conveniently summarized by Hugh Nibley and John L. Sorenson) have provided much more evidence substantiating the Book of Mormon as an ancient document.

To package what he thought could be potential arguments against the Book of Mormon, Elder Roberts puts in the mouths of “some future opponent of the Book of Mormon” four assumptions. Let us name them and then point out ways they have been dissolved by scholarly research.

1. The assumption, attributed by some to the Book of Mormon, of a common linguistic origin out of which came the great variations in language and language dialects apparent in the Americas.

2. The assumption of “literature available to Joseph Smith” and of “common knowledge” in the New York area as a “ground plan” for the Book of Mormon.

3. The assumption that Joseph Smith had a “sufficiently vivid and creative imagination” to produce such a work as the Book of Mormon.

4. The assumption of “striking parallels” between Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon.

. . .

4. Ethan Smith Parallels. Are there “striking parallels” between the Book of Mormon and Ethan Smith’s 1823 novel, View of the Hebrews, a fictional account of Israelites from the lost Ten Tribes who migrated to the Americas after the destruction of Jerusalem? Elder Roberts confirmed for his missionaries that any such parallels are abstract, even empty. Aside from the claim of Hebraic backgrounds, only two specific similarities occur: Ethan Smith quotes Isaiah at length and refers to the Urim and Thummim. But textual analysis shows independent sources for the two books. And now it turns out that some of Joseph Smith’s variant readings of Isaiah differ from the King James Version in much the same ways that the Dead Sea Scrolls, dated 150 B.C., and other early texts differ from it.

In 1843 Joseph Smith mentioned Ethan Smith as an example of one writer who took seriously Old World connections to the Americas. But Ethan Smith contended that the American Indians descended from the Lost Tribes. That is not what the Book of Mormon claims. As B. H. Roberts wrote in 1932, “Early authorities on Indian antiquities assigned to the Indians a Hebrew origin by claiming they were descendants of the Lost Tribes, [but] that, of course, you remember, is not the Book of Mormon attitude. While assigning to them Israelitish origin it nowhere claims that they are the Lost Tribes, but instead in the main are derived from the tribes of Ephraim and Manasseh with a slight infusion of the tribe of Judah through the advent of the people of Mulek who came from Jerusalem at the destruction of the family of Zedekiah, an account of which you may read in the Book of Mormon.” And, Elder Roberts might have added, if the emptiness of these purely circumstantial “parallels” is so plainly evident, how much more significant is the lack of parallels between Ethan Smith’s book and the spiritual content of the Book of Mormon.

Ethan Smith published a book on revelation in 1833, endorsed by several ministers in New York and Massachusetts. He also republished View of the Hebrews, revised and enlarged, in 1835. Both books were published long after the Book of Mormon began circulation. If critics can claim that Joseph Smith was aware of Ethan Smith’s novel, it surely can also be claimed that Ethan Smith was aware of Joseph Smith’s. And if Ethan Smith suspected or even wished to charge that the Book of Mormon plagiarized or purloined from his work, why didn’t he? Obviously, the work of these critics gets tougher and tougher to sustain.

Just before his death in September 1933, Elder Roberts was visited at his office by a long-time friend, Jack Christensen. He placed on Elder Roberts’s desk a second edition of the Ethan Smith volume. During the conversation, B. H. Roberts spoke of his Book of Mormon studies and then gave Christensen his considered judgment: “Ethan Smith played no part in the formation of the Book of Mormon.” In fact, Elder Roberts said that in central ways the Ethan Smith melange of fact and fiction was incompatible with the Book of Mormon claims. At the end of the conversation, Elder Roberts locked his eyes and said, “You accept Joseph Smith and all the scriptures.” Wrote Christensen, “I never felt anything more powerfully in my life.” Three weeks later, B. H. Roberts was dead.