While believers took Joseph Smith’s lack of education as evidence that divine inspiration was behind his many-layered work, detractors like Campbell saw it as evidence of hidden collaborators or literary theft. Sidney Rigdon was a well-educated and rhetorically polished ex-Campbellite preacher, and it was he whom Campbell believed had authored the work, incorporating a text supposedly written by one Solomon Spaulding. That hypothesis was later displaced when some parallels were noted with Ethan Smith’s 1823 View of the Hebrews, one of many contemporary efforts to link the native North Americans to the lost tribes of Israel. The Dominican friar Diego Duran had suggested such a connection in the sixteenth century, and it was picked up by Gregorio Garcia’s Origin of the Indians of the New World in 1607. English language publications on the subject included Thomas Thorowgood’s Jews in America, or Probabilities That the Americans are of that Race (1650), which influenced the Puritan John Eliot. Over the next two centuries, popular and influential treatments asserting Israelite ancestry of the American Indians would be produced by James Adair in 1775 and Elias Boudinot in 1816, before Ethan Smith’s popular work.

Most critics find the Book of Mormon’s parallels to books like View of the Hebrews less than persuasive of borrowing, but the search for some influence or complex of influences arising out of Smith’s context has continued unabated. Psychologists writing in the 1920s and, a few decades later, Fawn Brodie, author of a critical biography of Joseph Smith, alleged that anti-Masonic fervor, which broke out over the murder of Mason-exposer William Morgan in 1826, led to the depiction in the Book of Mormon of the ‘‘Gadianton Robbers.’’ Both were described as a ‘‘secret combination,’’ and employed secret oaths in their rituals (though Joseph Smith was himself a supporter and borrower of Masonry, not a critic).