Commenting on the necessity of belief in the Book of Mormon (and, related to such, the imperative for the historicity thereof), Terryl Givens wrote:
[The Book of Mormon]
is the essential link connecting the person Joseph Smith to the sources of
divine authority and revelation to which he laid claim. Smith declare that the
final author/editor of the Book of Mormon, Moroni, appeared to him as a
resurrected being, led him to the gold plates, and charged him with their
translation. If the Book of Mormon is not the ancient genuine ancient record it
purports to be, and if the gold plates were simply fantasy or of his own
making, then Smith’s story about ancient artifacts, angelic messengers, and the
authority they bequeathed him would be mere fables, and the claims of the
church to be an authorized restoration of Christianity impossible to sustain.
By comparison, the stories of Adam and Eve, or Noah and the flood, could be
myths or inspired fiction without undermining the Christian religion, because
the authority of Christianity is not tied to the historicity of those accounts.
Joseph Smith, on the other hand, did emphatically tie his own authority as a
prophet and apostle to the reality of ancient records transmitted to him by an
angelic being who was himself a character in that narrative. If you pull the
thread named Moroni and it comes loose, the entire garment unravels: his
reality as an ancient writer, the authenticity of the gold plates, Joseph Smith’s
claims to angelic visitations and the power of seership, and the priesthood
authority he claimed to receive from other messengers following in the wake of
Moroni. (Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know [New York:
Oxford University Press, 2020], 67-68)
