[p. 115]
Chapter IV
THE BOOK OF MORMON
The Book of Mormon explains itself as largely the work of Mormon, a military figure who led his people, the Nephites, from 327 to 385 A.D. in the twilight of their existence as a nation . . .
[p. 119]
Critics
By any standard the Book of Mormon is a narrative of unusual complexity. Scores of characters like Ether and Moroni, Jared and the brother of Jared, move through the story. The pronunciation guide in the current edition lists 284 proper names: Paanchi, Pachus, Pacumeni, Pagag, Pahoran, Pathros, Pekah, Rahab, Ramath, Rameumpton. Intricate and shattering events are compressed into a few sentences. Migration, war, and intrigue alternate with prophecy, sermon, and conversion. Mormon, as warrior, historian, and prophet himself, interwove political and military events with the history of salvation . . .
Besides the intricacy of plot, the narrative perspective is complicated. The first six books are pure source material, written by the original prophets and untouched by later editors. But then with only a slight introduction, Mormon takes up the story himself. In his narrative, derived from the available source materials, he quotes other prophets and sometimes quotes them quoting still others. Moroni injects a letter from his father, and Nephi inserts lengthy passages from previous scriptures. Mormon moves in and out of the narrative, pointing up a crucial conclusion or addressing readers with a sermon of his own. Almost always two minds are present and sometimes three, all kept account of in the flow of words . . .
[p. 125]
Alexander Campbell proved his knowledge of the Book of Mormon by summarizing about half of the plot, enough to give his readers a sense of the narrative. Campbell exhibited the customary contempt of Joseph Smith, "as ignorant and as impudent a knave as ever wrote a book," but he saw no need for a committee of authors. Joseph Smith definitely wrote it himself. "There never was a book more evidently written by one set of fingers, nor more certainly conceived in one cranium since the first book appeared in human language, than this same book." "It is as certainly Smith's fabrication as Satan is the father of lies. . . ."
In contrast to the Palmyra critics, Campbell downplayed the similarity to the Bible. What most impressed him was how unbiblical the Book of Mormon was. Partly it was style: "I would as soon compare a bat to the American eagle, a mouse to a mammoth . . . as to contrast it with a single chapter in all the writings of the Jewish or Christian prophets." More striking still was theology. He did not like the fact that Nephi and his brothers exercised the priesthood when they were not descendants of Levi or Aaron, that another land besides Palestine was a promised land, or that descendants of tribes other than Judah became kings. What most appalled him was that the Book of Mormon "represents the christian institution as practised among his Israelites before Jesus was born." The Nephites preached "baptism and other christian usages hundreds of years before Jesus Christ was born!" . . .
As for the intricate plot and the huge array of characters, Campbell dismissed all that as "romance." Subsequent critics had more trouble disregarding what every reader of the book could not help noticing: the Book of Mormon was a complex story. In 1833 the editor of the Painesville Telegraph, E. D. Howe, one of Mormonism's most devoted critics, and an excommunicated Mormon named Philastus Hurlbut teamed up to write an expose' and thought they had stumbled across the answer. While gathering material, Hurlbut learned that some residents of Conneaut, Ohio, saw in the Book of Mormon resemblances to a manuscript written by Solomon Spalding . . . [Hurlbut] and Howe eventually decided that Sidney Rigdon had obtained Spalding's now lost manuscript . . .
[p. 127]
. . . Howe and Hurlbut were sure "that there had been, from the beginning of the imposture, a more talented knave behind the curtain. . . ." Sidney Rigdon, a formidable preacher, a colleague of Alexander Campbell's, and a close student of the Bible, was the only one qualified for the task. "If there was a man in the world that could successfully spread and give a name to the vagaries of the Smiths, it was Rigdon." He was "the Iago, the prime mover of the whole conspiracy." (. . . Sidney Rigdon was suspected of complicity in the production of the Book of Mormon by the summer of 1831. James Gordon Bennett, who interviewed people concerning Mormonism in that summer, published this hypothesis in the New York Morning Courier and Enquirer, Aug. 31, 1831, and the Hillsborough (Ohio) Gazette of Oct. 29, 1831, stated that "there is no doubt but the ex-parson from Ohio is the author of the book which was recently printed in Palmyra, and passes for the new Bible." On Bennett, see Leonard J. Arrington, "James Gordon Bennett's 1831 Report on 'The Mormonites,'" B.Y.U. Studies, 10 (Spring, 1970):353-74.) . . .
The fact that Howe and Hurlbut contradicted Alexander Campbell was overlooked. Anti-Mormon writers felt no obligation to explain why the learned Bible student Rigdon would make all the elementary theological blunders Campbell identified, or why Rigdon's grammar should be so faulty. The view that Joseph wrote the book out of his own experience was cast aside until the Spalding theory failed and a revival of Campbell's environmentalist hypothesis became necessary once again.
Perhaps the most serious failing in all the critiques of the Book of Mormon was an inability to deal with text in any detail. Howe and
[p. 128]
Hurlbut acknowledged the story by hypothesizing a novelist as co-author but did not discuss the story itself. Campbell referred to the Book of Mormon positions on theological issues but failed to say what they were or how they related to religion of the time . . .
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