The Book of Mormon was vital to early Latter-day Saint religious life.[1] It also functioned as a sign to early converts that Joseph Smith was a prophet.[2] It fed the day-to-day lives of Saints who read its words, naved their children Lachonius, and borrowed bits and phrases from its passages in letters and sermons, but also served as proof to outsiders that Mormonism was true.

The fifth volume of the Revelations and Translations Series in the Joseph Smith Papers features “what remains of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon dictated by Joseph Smith.”[3] Comprising some 28% of the original ~500 pages, editors Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen have painstakingly identified, restored, and annotated for the benefit of scholars and those that read the Book of Mormon as sacred scripture today. You can read more about how the Church History Library digitized the original manuscript and revealed details invisible to the naked eye HERE.

Three possible ideas for research or critical assessment when using the dictated Book of Mormon manuscript came to me as I examined the volume’s pages.

• What do scholars know about the materiality of early Book of Mormon manuscripts? How did they change over time and what does it reveal about Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and their surrounding environs?
• What role does technology play in textual studies? What does it mean when we can see details that were either not supposed to be visible or were not visible to human eyes at all at any stage in the process?
• What more do we have to learn from how the Book of Mormon was used within Mormon/Latter-day Saint communities internally and externally?

Story in the LDS Church News

Story in the Salt Lake Tribune

I’ll be interviewing one of the editors elsewhere and will link to that interview once it’s published!

[1] Janiece Johnson, “Becoming a People of the Books: Toward an Understanding of Early Mormon Converts and the New Word of the Lord,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 1-43.

[2] Original argument from Grant Underwood, “Book of Mormon Usage in Early LDS Theology,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 17 (1984): 35-74. Updated and popularized by Terryl Givens in By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2022), chapter 3.

[3] Revelations and Translations, Volume 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, edited by Royal Skousen and Robin Scott Jensen (Salt Lake City: Church Historian’s Press, 2021), xi.