The
Loss of the 116 Pages
After the loss of the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon,
the Lord told the Prophet that evil men had altered the words of the lost
translation manuscript so that they read contrary to the original translation
(D&C 10:10-11), and so that if he translated the same again evil men would
publish an altered version claiming that he could not really translate.
"And behold they wilt publish this, and Satan will harden the hearts of
the people to stir them up to anger against you, that they will not believe my
words" (D&C 10:32). The Tanners and several other critics reject this
explanation: "If Satan did cause Joseph Smith's enemies to alter the
words," they argue, "these wicked people would have had to produce
the original pages to prove that Joseph Smith could not produce an accurate
duplicate of the original. It would be almost impossible to alter a manuscript
without detection. The Mormons could have taken the case to court and easily
won a significant victory" (pp. 58- 59).
I find such reasoning to be
unpersuasive in light of the hostile environment in which early Mormonism
emerged. In the face of poverty and persecution the Prophet's earliest
supporters were convinced that Joseph had the power to translate. a fact that
was the polestar of their faith. If the plot against the Prophet had succeeded,
it could conceivably have undermined the faith of some of Joseph's closest
supporters, whose help and devotion were crucial to the success of early
Mormonism. Early Mormons already faced an uphill battle. The Prophet's enemies
would hardly have needed to produce the original manuscript to harden the
hearts of the people and hinder the work from progressing. All they would have
had to do was print the altered version. After that, the manuscript
might have been destroyed or lost, but the effect would have been the same.
They would have claimed that the corrupted version was the earlier one. In the
end, it would have simply been a case of the Prophet's word against theirs. The
whole affair would have been reprinted and rumored abroad by other newspapers
within the region and would have tended to undermine the Prophet's credibility
at a time when most people were only too willing to find an excuse to
disbelieve the Book of Mormon, "Considering the state of transportation
and communication in antebellum America," notes Leonard J. Arrington,
"newspapers were able to 'get away with' ambiguous writing, if not
palpable falsehoods. This partly accounts for the pertinacity with which early
Americans held on to the false and damaging image of Mormonism" conveyed
by writers and publishers. (Leonard J. Arrington, "James Gordon Bennett's
1831 Report on 'The Mormonites,’ BYU Studies 10/3 (Spring 1970): 363. On the
treatment of early Mormonism by New York and Ohio newspapers during this period
see Walter A. Norton's superlative overview. "Comparative Images:
Mormonism and Contemporary Religions As Seen by Village Newspapermen in Western
New York and Northeastern Ohio. 1820-1833" (Ph.D. diss., Brigham Young
University. 1991).) (Matthew Roper, "A Black Hole That's
Not So Black," FARMS Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 6,
no. 2 [1994]: 174-75)
The
Small Plates as the Replacement Solution
Joseph Smith’s short-term response to the manuscript’s theft
was to continue dictating the Book of Mormon narrative where he had left off in
the early part of the Book of Mosiah. Several weeks into this work, Joseph
received a revelation that sidestepped possible snares awaiting him from the
thieves and solved both the problems that would arise from reproducing the
stolen manuscript and those that would raise from not reproducing it.
Addressing Joseph, the revelation commanded him to “not
translate again those words which have gone forth out of your hands” (D&C
10:30). The rationale for this forbearance was that Joseph’s enemies were not
only intending to use the stolen manuscript to test his abilities as a
translator, they were also intending to rig the supposed test against him by
altering the manuscript. Rather than a test, this was a trap. If Joseph was
unable to exactly reproduce the translation (a feast that would be difficult,
as suggested by D&C 9:8-9, Joseph had to “study out” the exact wording of
the text), then they could have used the stolen manuscript to point this out against
him. If Joseph was able to reproduce the translation exactly, then by altering
the text they could claim that he was unable to do so.
The revelation handily solved this problem of not reproducing
the stolen text by instructing Joseph to replace it with another
account covering the same time period. This replacement text would be the
account in “the plates of Nephi” (D&C 10:38-45). (Don Bradley, The Lost
116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories [Salt Lake
City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019], 107)
