Book of Mormon

The Book of Mormon presents itself as the sacred history of several groups said to have crossed the ocean to the Americas. The largest thread follows a family led by the prophet Lehi, who leaves Jerusalem about 600 BC; his descendants divide into the Nephites and the Lamanites, whose long, often warring history the book recounts.

A second, older people, the Jaredites, are traced to the confusion of tongues at Babel. Running through the whole is an insistently Christian message: prophets across the centuries are said to have foreseen and testified of Jesus Christ, and the book's culminating episode is the appearance of the risen Christ to the Nephites, to whom he preaches, whom he heals, and among whom he establishes his church.

Doctrinally the book teaches faith in Christ, repentance, baptism, the gift of the Holy Ghost, and endurance to the end, and it dwells at length on the Atonement and the resurrection. It closes with an exhortation, known as Moroni's promise, inviting readers to ask God whether the book is true. Within Latter-day Saint life it is read devotionally, quoted constantly, given to prospective converts, and treated as tangible evidence of Joseph Smith's prophetic mission; it has been translated, in whole or part, into more than a hundred languages.

The tradition's account of how the book came to be is inseparable from the story of Joseph Smith. Latter-day Saints relate that in 1823 an angel named Moroni, in life the last of the Nephite prophets, appeared to the young Smith and told him of a record engraved on golden plates buried in a hill near his home, later called Cumorah. After four years Smith is said to have received the plates in 1827 and to have translated their "reformed Egyptian" characters "by the gift and power of God," using seer stones and the interpreters the tradition calls the Urim and Thummim, dictating to scribes, chiefly Oliver Cowdery, with Martin Harris earlier assisting.

The work was published in March 1830 by the Palmyra printer E. B. Grandin, financed by Harris. Bound into the book are two signed statements: the Testimony of Three Witnesses (Cowdery, Harris, and David Whitmer), who affirmed that an angel showed them the plates, and the Testimony of Eight Witnesses, who said they handled them. The plates themselves, the tradition holds, were returned to the angel and so are not available for examination. This paragraph reports the account as the tradition gives it; the following one takes up how scholars assess it.

Whether the Book of Mormon describes real ancient events is sharply contested, and the atlas marks the point as debated. Latter-day Saints receive it as a genuine translation of an ancient record and point to its complexity, its internal consistency, and the witnesses' testimonies. Mainstream archaeology, linguistics, and genetics, however, find no support for a pre-Columbian migration of Near Eastern peoples to the Americas: no site, artifact, language, or inscription has been identified with the Nephites, Lamanites, or Jaredites, and studies of Native American DNA point overwhelmingly to Asian, not Near Eastern, ancestry. Many scholars accordingly read the book as a work of the nineteenth century, reflecting the religious debates, biblical idiom, and preoccupations of Joseph Smith's environment, whatever the manner of its composition.

The church's own Gospel Topics essay "Book of Mormon and DNA Studies" engages the genetic question, arguing that the science does not test the book's central claims as the tradition understands them. Terryl Givens' academic study traces both the book's claims and the long history of the argument over them. The honest summary is that the book's status as ancient history is affirmed by the tradition and not accepted by secular scholarship, a genuine disagreement between faith and academic method, presented here without adjudication.