In sheer size and complexity, it is a formidable book, now translated into many languages, and not readily dismissed as the sheer fabrication of an unlettered youth. Yet, understandably, it has never been taken seriously as a work of ancient scripture by non-Mormon scholars, who have usually explained it as the product of hidden authorship or of sheer plagiarism (perhaps based on View of the Hebrews by Ethan Smith, no relation to Joseph). Accordingly, no exegetical or hermeneutical treatment of the book has been undertaken by non-Mormon scholars, although in more recent years they have started to take the book more seriously as a legitimate, if rather imaginative, nineteenth-cen-tury American religious treatise (e.g., O'Dea 1957, Stendahl 1984).