Description:

Joseph Smith wasn’t merely the Book of Mormon’s prophetic translator—he was also a student of the sacred record. Schooling the Prophet offers evidence that the Latter-day Saint prophet was quietly influenced by one of the most important sources of religious thought and sacred protocol that he knew—the Book of Mormon—on issues such as the nature of God, priesthood, and the temple.

“Painstakingly researched and carefully written, Gerald Smith's Schooling the Prophet shows how deep—as the subtitle of the book states—was the influence of the Book of Mormon on Joseph Smith and the early restoration. Gerald Smith's study demonstrates how profoundly—and paradoxically, since Joseph Smith only occasionally cited it—the Book of Mormon shaped early Latter-day Saint theology and practice, including baptism, the sacrament, the temple, and the concept of Zion. Warmly to be recommended.”

—Stephen D. Ricks, Professor of Hebrew and Cognate Learning, Brigham Young University

Review

Few books enter the world with a more explicit demand on the reader than the one Joseph Smith's title page makes: read this record, ask God whether it is true, and expect a definitive spiritual answer. The Book of Mormon is, before it is anything else, a machine for compelling revelation. It flattens the distance between text and divine encounter, presenting itself as a latter-day artifact whose most forceful claim is not historical but experiential — that "by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things." A book that ends not with a narrative resolution but with an invitation to prayer, with a procedure for verification that bypasses all the ordinary apparatus of scholarship and criticism, has staked everything on the proposition that its reader will not remain a reader. That proposition is, I think, the most distinctive thing about it, and the one that makes a straightforward literary assessment so difficult.

The work is, by its own account, an abridgment — Mormon and his son Moroni selecting from a vast plate-corpus, compressing and editorializing, inserting "thus we see" lessons into the narrative and addressing future readers directly across the gulf of time. The framing is self-consciously a record-keeping project, a multi-generational chain of custody that passes from Nephi to Jacob to Enos to Jarom to Omni and eventually into Mormon's editorial hands, with the Jaredite record (the Book of Ether) inserted near the end as a cautionary parallel — a civilization that rose and annihilated itself in mutual destruction before the Nephites ever arrived. The whole apparatus is designed to argue a moral thesis: that "inasmuch as ye shall keep the commandments of God ye shall prosper in the land," and that pride, secret combinations, and the rejection of revelation bring certain collapse. This is not a subtle thesis. It is restated, re-demonstrated, and re-applied across a thousand years of narrated history with a relentlessness that makes the book, in one sense, a very long sermon with very many object lessons.

That sermon has a theological core, and it is laid down early. In 2 Nephi, the patriarch Lehi teaches his son Jacob that "Adam fell that men might be; and men are, that they might have joy. And the Messiah cometh in the fulness of time, that he may redeem the children of men from the fall." This is the book's anthropology in miniature: the Fall is not a catastrophe but a condition of possibility for human existence, and human existence is oriented toward joy, and joy is made available through a Messiah whose atonement bridges the chasm between what we are and what we might become. The same chapter gives us the doctrine of opposition — "it must needs be, that there is an opposition in all things" — which becomes the metaphysical engine driving the entire narrative: righteousness and wickedness, freedom and bondage, Nephite and Lamanite, Christ and anti-Christ, each defining the other. The book's most famous formulation of the human condition comes in King Benjamin's sermon, where an angel tells the assembled people that "the natural man is an enemy to God, and has been from the fall of Adam, and will be, forever and ever, unless he yields to the enticings of the Holy Spirit, and putteth off the natural man and becometh a saint through the atonement of Christ the Lord." The natural man is not merely flawed; he is at war with God. And the only exit from that war is a transformation so total that it requires a new word — "saint" — to describe what emerges on the other side.

The narrative that carries this theology is, in its early books, a family drama of extraordinary intensity. The first book of Nephi opens with one of the most arresting self-introductions in scripture: "I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents, therefore I was taught somewhat in all the learning of my father; and having seen many afflictions in the course of my days, nevertheless, having been highly favored of the Lord in all my days; yea, having had a great knowledge of the goodness and the mysteries of God, therefore I make a record of my proceedings in my days." The voice is confident, reflective, and already straining against the constraints of a mere chronicle — this is a man who has seen visions and means to tell you about them. The family he belongs to is riven by the same opposition that structures the whole cosmology. Laman and Lemuel, the elder brothers, are perpetual murmurers; they resent their father's visions, they resent Nephi's righteousness, they resent the whole project of leaving Jerusalem for a wilderness they cannot see the point of. Nephi, for his part, is the obedient son who receives the visions his father cannot fully interpret and who, in the book's most ethically difficult passage, is constrained by the Spirit to slay a drunken Laban because "it is better that one man should perish than that a nation should dwindle and perish in unbelief." The reader who balks at this — and many readers have balked — is in the same position as Nephi's brothers, and the book knows it. The ethical tension is not resolved; it is left as a standing provocation, a test case for the claim that divine commandment can override ordinary moral reasoning.

The book's middle sections — Mosiah, Alma, Helaman — are where its political and ecclesiological imagination takes full shape. The reign of the judges, established by King Mosiah as a deliberate replacement for monarchy, is a constitutional experiment grounded in the conviction that "how much iniquity doth one wicked king cause." The king-men who attempt to overthrow this system are villains; the freemen who defend it are heroes. Captain Moroni, the great Nephite military leader, raises a "title of liberty" inscribed with the words "In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children" — a document that functions simultaneously as a battle standard, a covenant, and a political manifesto. Mormon's editorial voice breaks in at this point to deliver what is perhaps the book's most unrestrained eulogy: "Yea, verily, verily I say unto you, if all men had been, and were, and ever would be, like unto Moroni, behold, the very powers of hell would have been shaken forever; yea, the devil would never have power over the hearts of the children of men." The editor is not neutral. He is writing a history designed to produce exactly this kind of moral admiration, and he is telling you so.

Yet the political and military material is shot through with a counter-current that complicates any simple reading of the book as a celebration of righteous violence. The converted Lamanites who call themselves Anti-Nephi-Lehies make a covenant that represents the book's highest ethical aspiration: "they had rather sacrifice their lives than even to take the life of their enemy; and they have buried their weapons of war deep in the earth, because of their love towards their brethren." This is not a tactical decision; it is a theological one — a conviction that the shedding of blood is so grave that it is better to die than to break an oath against it. The book holds this absolute pacifism in tension with its just-war ethic, never fully resolving the contradiction. Mormon himself, after leading Nephite armies, eventually refuses to lead a war of vengeance, declaring "Vengeance is mine, and I will repay." The tension between Moroni the defender and the Anti-Nephi-Lehies who lie down to be slain is not a flaw in the book's moral reasoning; it is the book's moral reasoning, and it is meant to be lived inside.

The narrative climax is the resurrected Christ's personal appearance to the Nephites at the temple in Bountiful, an event that occupies the whole of 3 Nephi and transforms the book from a record of a people into a record of a divine visitation. The voice that speaks from the darkness after the cataclysm is both terrifying and gentle: "Behold, I am Jesus Christ, whom the prophets testified shall come into the world. And behold, I am the light and the life of the world; and I have drunk out of that bitter cup which the Father hath given me, and have glorified the Father in taking upon me the sins of the world." The Christ who descends in a white robe invites the multitude to thrust their hands into his side and feel the print of the nails, gives the Beatitudes and the Lord's Prayer in a form closely parallel to the Sermon on the Mount, institutes the sacrament, calls twelve disciples, and declares his doctrine with the refrain "Verily, verily, I say unto you, this is my doctrine." The effect is to re-center the entire sprawling narrative on a single, luminous, physically present figure — and to make everything that came before it read as prophecy and everything after it read as consequence. The book's theological architecture is not, ultimately, a system of ideas; it is a person, and the person is Jesus Christ. The doctrinal passages — the "doctrine of Christ" in 2 Nephi 31, the atonement theology of Alma 34, the charity discourse of Moroni 7 — are all, in the end, pointing toward this appearance, and the appearance is the thing itself.

The closing books are, by contrast, a long descent into darkness. Mormon's record of the final Nephite war at Cumorah is terse and terrible; Moroni, writing alone and in hiding, preserves fragments of liturgy and a father's epistles against infant baptism, and then closes with a catalogue of the gifts of the Spirit and the famous promise that the record will come forth "like as one crying from the dead." The Jaredite parallel — the Book of Ether — is the book's most concentrated horror: a civilization that rises from the Tower of Babel, sees the premortal Christ in a moment of sublime intimacy ("Behold, I am he who was prepared from the foundation of the world to redeem my people. Behold, I am Jesus Christ. I am the Father and the Son"), and then destroys itself in a war between Coriantumr and Shiz so total that only one man is left standing. The insertion of this record near the end of the Nephite narrative is a structural masterstroke: it turns the Nephite story from a tragedy into a pattern, and it implies that the pattern is, for anyone who will not repent, inexorable.

The book's relationship to the Bible is both genetic and agonistic. It quotes Isaiah at enormous length — the entire block of 2 Nephi 12–24 is Isaiah — and it quotes Malachi in 3 Nephi, and it recites the Ten Commandments through Abinadi, and it has Jesus deliver a version of the Sermon on the Mount that is, in many places, nearly identical to the Matthean text. But it also insists, through Nephi's vision and through Mormon's editorial voice, that the Bible has been corrupted — that "plain and precious parts" have been removed, that the Book of Mormon is the restoration of those parts, and that the two records together constitute a single witness. The book's own cross-references — the prophecies of Zenos and Zenock, the brass plates, the covenants of Abraham — construct an intertextual world that is both inside and outside the biblical canon, claiming the authority of the old while asserting the necessity of the new. This is a book that wants to be a Bible, and that is either a breathtaking act of theological imagination or a 19th-century prophetic expansion, depending on where you stand. The text itself does not give you a neutral position from which to decide.

What is most difficult to assess is the book's treatment of race. The narrative assigns a "skin of blackness" to the Lamanites as a mark of the curse, describes converted Lamanites whose skin "became white," and speaks of a people becoming "dark and loathsome" through unbelief — language that has been read, historically, as a literal racial curse and that the mainstream LDS tradition now disavows as a figurative or covenantal description. The book itself, however, also contains the command "revile no more against them because of the darkness of their skins" and the observation that the Lamanites are at times "more righteous than you." The tension is not resolvable by any simple appeal to the text; it is in the text, and it is one of the places where the book's moral imagination is most visibly strained. A reader who comes to the Book of Mormon expecting a consistent racial ethic will not find one; what they will find is a record of a people struggling with the meaning of difference, and sometimes transcending their own categories and sometimes reinforcing them.

The book belongs to the Abrahamic tradition broadly and to the Restoration movement specifically — it is the founding scripture of a tradition that now numbers in the millions and that has produced a dense, contentious, and still-unfolding interpretive culture. It sits at the center of debates about historicity (was there a real Nephi? a real Zarahemla? a real Cumorah?), about geography (Mesoamerica? the American heartland? a hemispheric reading?), about translation (tight or loose? functional or expansionist?), and about the relationship between scripture and 19th-century American religious culture. These debates are not external to the book; they are, in a sense, what the book's existence produces. A work that claims to be "Another Testament of Jesus Christ" and that offers itself to the reader with the instruction to pray for a confirming witness is, by its nature, a work that generates communities of interpretation and then divides them. The Book of Mormon has generated the LDS Church, the Community of Christ, the Temple Lot church, various fundamentalist groups, and a large, dispersed, non-institutional readership that treats it as inspired without treating it as historical. It is, in terms of sheer cultural productivity, one of the most consequential books ever written in the English language.

What is the Book of Mormon for? It is for the person who is willing to take it on its own terms — to read it as a record of a people who saw Christ, to pray about it, and to live inside the covenant it describes. It is not for the person who needs a clean, unproblematic text; it is a book full of ethical knots, racial language that has aged badly, and the unresolved tension between the sword and the buried weapon. It is not for the reader who wants a novelistic narrative with fully realized characters and a satisfying arc; its characters are mostly types, its narrative is mostly sermon, and its arc is, in the end, a warning. But it is for the reader who wants to see what a scripture looks like when it is still raw — still making its claims, still demanding its verification, still insisting that the world it describes is the real one and that the reader's own world is the one that needs to be re-examined. That is a formidable thing to ask of a book. The Book of Mormon asks it without embarrassment, and it has been asking it now for nearly two centuries, and it is not finished.