Book of the Law of the Lord

When James Strang claimed to have translated the Book of the Law of the Lord from an ancient set of plates using the Urim and Thummim, he was not introducing a new kind of religious claim into the Latter Day Saint movement. He was repeating, deliberately, the exact evidentiary shape Joseph Smith had already used to authenticate the Book of Mormon, a translation from golden plates by the same named instrument, and Strang's early followers would have recognized the pattern immediately.

Strang went further than simply echoing Smith's claim. His editions carried prefaces including affidavits from a small number of named witnesses attesting to the plates' existence, again mirroring the Book of Mormon's own witness testimonies, a structure meant to give a skeptical or wavering follower the same kind of evidentiary reassurance Smith's movement had offered from its own beginning.

The strategy makes sense given who Strang was trying to persuade. After Joseph Smith's 1844 death, Strang was competing for the loyalty of Latter Day Saints who already accepted translated ancient scripture as a live possibility within their faith, not skeptics who needed to be convinced translation from hidden plates could happen at all. Producing his own plates, translated by the same claimed method and backed by the same kind of witness testimony, was the most direct way available to make his own prophetic claim legible to an audience Smith had already prepared to receive exactly this kind of book.

The Book of the Law of the Lord exists in two distinct print editions, and the gap between them says something about how fast Strang's kingdom on Beaver Island was still taking shape. The first, published in 1851, ran eighty pages. The second, in 1856, had grown to 320 pages, expanded with additional material Strang continued producing as his theocratic government developed, and it was left unbound at the time of his assassination that same year, not bound into finished copies until afterward.

What sets this book apart from many nineteenth century American scriptural claims is not its content alone but its persistence. Strang's kingdom itself did not survive him. Beaver Island's Mormon settlement was violently driven off by mob action within months of his death, and the Strangite movement never rebuilt anything resembling the political structure the book was written to govern. Yet the small church that carried Strang's claim forward kept the book itself as living scripture rather than letting it become only a historical artifact.

That continuity is visible directly today. The modern Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, Strangite, still small and still centered on Strang's original claims, publishes the complete text of the Book of the Law of the Lord on its own website, offered freely and without restriction, treating a document written to govern an island kingdom that collapsed within Strang's own lifetime as scripture its members still read.