Joseph
Smith was steeped in the experience of scriptural insufficiency. As a youthful
seeker, he quickly lost any illusions about sola scriptura, “for the
teachers of religion of the different sects understood the same passage of
scripture so differently as to destroy all confidence in settling the question
by an appeal to the Bible.” Significantly, Smith never dated his prophetic
call from 1820, but from 1827, when he began his Book of Mormon translation.
This experience radically reconfigured his understanding of restoration, a term
that for centuries had emphasized removing, stripping away, and distilling
down, Christian forms and practices to an unadulterated original model. (Terryl
Givens, The Prophecy of Enoch as Restoration Blueprint [Leonard J. Arrington
Mormon History Lecture Series No. 18; Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press,
2012], 1, emphasis added)
