The foundation text and history of the Mormons
JOSEPH SMITH REPORTED that he first saw the gold plates that bore the text of the Book of Mormon on September 22, 1823, secured in a stone box buried in a hill near his family’s farm in upstate New York. Not quite twenty years later, and nearly 1,000 miles away, he stashed the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon – his translation of the writing on the plates – in another stone box, cut into the cornerstone of a boarding house his church was building in their settlement on the Mississippi. By then the plates were long gone and Smith was eager to be shot of the original manuscript, too. Associates standing near him at the cornerstone-laying ceremony heard the Prophet remark that “he had had trouble enough with it”.
The “trouble enough” story is a favourite of those looking to undermine the Book of Mormon and Smith’s prophetic career. It’s a useful story for sceptics, who read it as a moment of rakish candour from a man they assume to be a fraud. More sympathetic readers have heard Smith’s lament differently. He wasn’t remarking on the trouble that the Book of Mormon had caused him – after all, while the attention it attracted had not always made his life easy, it had made him successful in ways he could never have imagined as a farm boy in New York. What he meant when he got rid of the original manuscript, according to this reading, was that he was tired of having to protect it. People kept running off with it, or trying to. Just as the ancient stone box had protected the plates, the sealed cornerstone would protect the manuscript.
The story is also a cipher for Mormonism’s relationship with its books: in that scene Smith is either hiding an embarrassing book or securing a sacred one, depending on what you’re expecting or looking for. In the 200 years since Smith started talking about the plates, Mormonism’s books have been key to its triumphs, challenges and controversies – primary sources for followers and critics. They have been the locus of the most important questions of Mormon history, practice and thought, both within and without the tradition: who has the right to issue authoritative texts? Who can interpret them? What can and cannot be done with them?
Mormonism’s real first book was the King James Bible – it inspired Smith to search for a true church and is clearly his most consistent influence. His career and Mormonism itself started with the story of the plates, tho
