In February 1828, Martin Harris arrived in Harmony to assist the Prophet. By June, the Prophet had translated 116 pages with Martin Harris as his scribe. Martin asked for Joseph’s permission to return to New York and show the manuscript pages to his wife and a few others, but the Lord forbade it. Because of Martin’s continual pleading, Joseph asked the Lord twice more, and the Lord permitted Martin to take the manuscript if he agreed to certain conditions. However, through Martin’s carelessness, the manuscript pages were taken by “wicked men” (D&C 10:8). Because of this mistake, Joseph Smith lost the gift to translate for a time. After the Prophet’s gift was restored, the Lord sent Oliver Cowdery to assist him in the work of translation. Translating the Book of Mormon, Latter-day Saint History: 1815–1846 Teacher Material.
The “lost 116 pages” were the original manuscript pages of what Joseph Smith, founder of the Latter Day Saint movement, said was the translation of the Book of Lehi, the first portion of the golden plates revealed to him by an angel in 1827. These pages, which had not been copied, were lost by Smith’s scribe, Martin Harris, during the summer of 1828 and are presumed to have been destroyed. Smith completed the Book of Mormon without retranslating the Book of Lehi, replacing it with what he said was an abridgment taken from the Plates of Nephi.
Fawn Brodie has written that Smith “realized that it was impossible for him to reproduce the story exactly, and that to redictate it would be to invite devastating comparisons. Harris’s wife taunted him: ‘If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it.'” Ex-Mormons Jerald and Sandra Tanner* argued that the lost manuscript suggested that Smith was not a misguided individual who believed in his own creative imagination but was at least minimally aware of his own deception.
Martin Harris (May 18, 1783 – July 10, 1875) was an early convert to the Latter Day Saint movement who financially guaranteed the first printing of the Book of Mormon.
In 1828, Martin Harris, acting as scribe for Joseph Smith, recorded the first 116 pages of The Book of Mormon. He asked permission of Joseph Smith to let him borrow these pages to take home with him so he could show them to his wife. Martin’s wife was very skeptical and feared that her wealthy husband was being conned out of his money in order to get the Book of Mormon published for Joseph. Joseph inquired of the Lord to know if he might do as Martin Harris had requested, but was refused. Joseph inquired again, but received a second refusal. Still, Martin Harris persisted as before, and Joseph applied again, but the last answer was not like the two former ones. In this the Lord permitted Martin Harris to take the manuscript home with him. Three weeks later Mr. Harris returned to Joseph and told him that he had lost the 116 pages.
Joseph was very distraught over this, exclaiming “Oh, my God! All is lost! All is lost! What shall I do? I have sinned.” It is widely believed that Martin Harris’ wife had taken the pages. The reasoning was that if Joseph was indeed a prophet he could retranslate those same pages exactly as before and that would prove he was actually translating instead of just making up the Book of Mormon story as he dictated to Martin. Finally, Joseph inquired of the Lord as to what he should do; in response, he received a revelation, which is recorded in section 10 of the Doctrine & Covenants. He was told that he should not retranslate those lost pages because Satan’s cunning plan was to have evil men alter the words in the original translation and wait until Joseph retranslated those pages. The evil men would then produce the original lost 116 pages with the alterations to prove that Joseph was a fraud.
What is the LDS church’s official position about those missing pages? Well, in harmony with the millions of words that have been written in support of their religion, and each time anti-LDS criticism is leveled against it, the following two sentences will suffice: (highlighted at this author’s discretion).
The loss of the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript is an example of Satan’s efforts to destroy the Prophet Joseph Smith and to prevent the kingdom of God from being established. The Lord told the Prophet Joseph Smith that Satan was behind the loss of the manuscript.
(Doctrine and Covenants Instructor’s Guide: The Lost Manuscript, Lesson 3)
In response to the MormonThink article, FAIR, “Faithful Answers, Informed Responses” has an extensive follow-up: 4,564 words worth. You can read it for yourself if you are inclined, but it’s as equally boring as The Book of Mormon.
J.B. Haws, associate professor of Church history and doctrine at Brigham Young University also writes about those 116 pages: (highlighted at this author’s discretion).
J.B. Haws is the executive director of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship. Haws began working at BYU in 2011 as a faculty member in the College of Religious Education. As a scholarly community, the Institute supports work that inspires and fortifies Latter-day Saints in their testimonies of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ.
From the outset, one thing we can say that we do know about the story of the lost 116 pages is that from the summer of 1828 until now, this episode has loomed large in the narrative history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
It would be difficult to imagine a more agonizing string of events in the life of Joseph Smith than what he experienced in June and July of 1828. Under pressure, he let Martin Harris take the hundred-plus manuscript pages of the Book of Mormon translation that Martin had scribed while Joseph had dictated. The pages represented two months of work. The day after Joseph and his wife Emma bid farewell to Martin, Emma gave birth to their first child. The child was either stillborn or died soon after birth. Emma almost died in childbirth. After two weeks, and although Emma was still very much convalescing, Joseph and Emma’s mutual anxiety about those manuscript pages prompted him to leave his wife in the care of her parents and make the long trip to Palmyra to find out why he had not heard anything yet from Martin…
Latter-day Saints come to the precisely opposite conclusion. They see in the resolution of this lost manuscript episode—after all of the soul searching and heart wrenching it brought to Joseph Smith and Martin Harris—a miracle thousands of years in the making, beginning with Nephi’s creation of a second record, and then Mormon’s addition of that record to his abridgment (and both Nephi and Mormon wrote that they acted based on inspiration which they admitted they did not fully understand [see Words of Mormon 1:7; 1 Nephi 9:2, 5]). Latter-day Saints see, in all of this, evidence that the Lord allows humans their agency, but neither human agency exercised in opposition to his will, nor the “cunning of the devil,” can frustrate the works of God (Doctrine and Covenants 10:43). They see in the 116 pages story a reassurance that “all things” really can “work together for good to them that love God” (Romans 8:28). For them, and for that reason, it is a story worth frequent retelling.
Let us not discount independent LDS historian, Don Bradley’s 352 page tome, “The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories.” In the world of interpreting LDS history, you can find almost anything you want in a text if you try hard enough. In many respects, LDS apologetics consists of starting with a certain conclusion and then crafting and interpreting source material in such a way as to support that conclusion. Bradley was disillusioned at one point and found it difficult to understand and explain Joseph Smith and subsequently exited the church and had his records removed from church archives. He drifted further and further away from the Church in which he had been raised, even spending time as an agnostic and atheist, then back to theist, then Baha’i, then generic Protestant. After more studying (whatever that means), he discovered his faith being strengthened and returned to the LDS church.
On a summer day in 1828, Book of Mormon scribe and witness Martin Harris was emptying drawers, upending furniture, and ripping apart mattresses as he desperately looked for a stack of papers he had sworn to God to protect. Those pages containing the only copy of the first three months of the Joseph Smith’s translation of the golden plates were forever lost, and the detailed stories they held forgotten over the ensuing years–until now.
In this highly anticipated work, author Don Bradley presents over a decade of historical and scriptural research to not only tell the story of the lost pages but to reconstruct many of the detailed stories written on them
Logic & Reason are not to be discounted when discussing LDS theology.
One of the Internet’s most logical and reasoned responses to this LDS teaching comes from a Redditor, and former Mormon, named “deleted.” He states simply:
Just watch the South Park episode “All About Mormons”. They’re pretty spot-on about it. Basically Martin Harris’ wife Lucy wanted to hold on to the manuscript to determine if Joseph Smith could reproduce it exactly without the original, which would prove God was working through him. Joseph knew he couldn’t ever produce the same 116 pages exactly, so he went in a different direction with it, claiming God directed him to translate the small plates instead, which would give the same essential story but with a slightly different focus. Pretty easy to see right through that when you realize he essentially just found an excuse to cover the same material again, but more generally this time because he couldn’t reproduce it exactly. Lucy never intended to give the pages to “conspiring men” as the Mormon narrative states, just keep them locked away to test Joseph Smith’s legitimacy.
Also, the claim that God knew the pages would be lost and instructed Nephi to create a separate set of plates to prepare for this is laughable. Pretty sure if God saw it coming he would have either sent an angel with a flaming sword to stop Joseph from letting Harris take the pages, or would have shown him how to get them back–not had Nephi scratch away on hard plates that would become a disposable volume used to help teach Joseph a lesson. Mormons had to make sure their version of the whole story was believed because they knew it would come back as a controversial issue with Joseph Smith (which it is, but not as obvious to Mormons who have the church’s version hardwired into them). Probably the reason why the lost pages has a whole lesson dedicated to it as part of the curriculum for 5-yr old primary kids–gotta make sure they understand the Mormon version early on. My wife had that calling as primary teacher and it’s one of the things that led her to leaving.
The Redditor’s comments mirror the same historical criticisms about Joseph Smith’s claim that he was instructed not to join any of the religious movements of his day.
Joseph did not claim that the churches of the day were “an abomination.” He was told that their creeds were an abomination. According to Joseph Smith’s history, he was told the following by Jesus Christ during the First Vision:
I was answered that I must join none of them, for they were all wrong; and the Personage who addressed me said that all their creeds were an abomination in his sight; that those professors were all corrupt; that: “they draw near to me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me, they teach for doctrines the commandments of men, having a form of godliness, but they deny the power thereof.
• Mormon scriptures claim that the LDS church is “the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” (Doctrine and Covenants, 1:30).
• Joseph Smith stated: “This [the LDS] Church…is the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth” (Doctrine and Covenants 1:30).
• President Ezra Taft Benson said: “This is not just another Church. This is not just one of a family of Christian churches. This is the Church and kingdom of God, the only true Church upon the face of the earth…” (Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson, p.164-165).
• Bruce McConkie stated: “If it had not been for Joseph Smith and the restoration, there would be no salvation. There is no salvation outside The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” (Mormon Doctrine, p.670).
• Marion Romney (LDS First Presidency) said, “This Church is the ensign on the mountain spoken of by the Old Testament prophets. It is the way, the truth, and the life” (Conference Report, April, 1961, pg. 119).
TELL US MORE ABOUT THAT “GREAT APOSTASY.”
Joseph Smith never used that term but Latter-day Saint General Authority, B.H. Roberts is generally accepted as the one who first promoted the apostasy narrative. The modern church tends to soft-pedal the harsh rhetoric denouncing the “Church of Satan,” noting that not everything good about Christianity disappeared, but if there was no Great Apostasy of the early Christian church then there would be no reason for Mormonism’s “Restoration.” Taking the simplified formula for modern politics … “Our political party is obviously the answer for America’s future because the other guys are evil and bad.”
In the great vision of the ancient American prophet Nephi, he describes the coming forth of a record of the Jews, the Bible, which contains “the covenants of the Lord” and “many of the prophecies of the holy prophets” (1 Nephi 13:23). Of this book Nephi declares, “When it proceeded forth from the mouth of a Jew it contained the fulness of the gospel of the Lord,” but “there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book” (vv. 24, 28).
SPEAKING OF “FRACTURED,” HOW ABOUT THE MORMON CHURCH?
From its founding, Mormonism itself has been a source of endless in-fights and divisions, solid evidence that the real problem with a fractured church is not corrupted Scriptures or orthodox Christian doctrine but corrupted hearts of Mormon followers.
Although a few small factions broke with Smith’s organization during his lifetime, he retained the allegiance of the vast majority of Latter Day Saints until his death in June 1844. Following Smith’s death, the movement underwent a leadership crisis which led to a schism within the church. The largest group followed Brigham Young and settled in what became the Utah Territory and is now the Utah-based LDS Church. The second-largest faction, Community of Christ, coalesced around Joseph Smith III, eldest son of Joseph Smith. Other would-be leaders included the senior surviving member of the First Presidency, Sidney Rigdon; the newly baptized James Strang from Wisconsin; and Alpheus Cutler, one of the Council of Fifty. Each of these men still retains a following as of 2014 — however tiny it may be in some cases — and all of their organizations have undergone further schisms. Other claimants, such as Granville Hedrick, William Bickerton, and Charles B. Thompson, later emerged to start still other factions, some of which have further subdivided.
Diagram showing over 70 branches of Mormonism with their relative origins and approximate years of division. The thicker central line after 1844 is the largest by numbers Brighamite branch. (CLICK FOR FULL SIZE VIEW)
Joseph Smith claimed that the Bible itself has been corrupted over time and the church’s official position is that it is only reliable “as far as it is translated correctly.” In his excellent book, “Letters To A Mormon Elder,” James White spends an entire chapter refuting this error. The following paragraph is a sample of his studious and well researched response:
James R. White is the director of Alpha and Omega Ministries and a Pastor/Elder at Apologia Church in Mesa, Arizona. He has taught Greek, Hebrew, Systematic Theology, Textual Criticism, Church History, and various topics in the field of apologetics for numerous schools. He has authored or contributed to more than twenty-four books.
While it may be true that none of the over 5,000 Greek manuscripts (as an example) of the New Testament read exactly like another, this in itself is not a very meaningful fact. That any hand-written document of the length of even one of the Gospels should read exactly like another would be quite remarkable, for the probability of misspelling even one word, or skipping one “and” in a whole book is quite high. But, despite this, it is amazing that at least 75% of the text of the New Testament is without textual variation; that is, 3 out of 4 words in the New Testament are to be found without variation in all the manuscripts we have. 95% of the remaining 25% of the text is easily determined by the process of textual criticism. Textual criticism is the process whereby, of knowing the propensities of scribes in making errors and utilizing the incredibly rich amount of evidence available to us (the New Testament, for example, has far more manuscript evidence available for study than any other document of antiquity), the most likely original reading is determined from the possibilities presented by the manuscripts. That leaves but a little less than 1 1/2 percent of the entire text — less than two out of every one hundred words — where serious doubt as to the exact wording of the original exists. But note this well, Elder, one thing that is not in doubt is that we do have the original readings available to us in the possibilities given to us by the manuscript tradition. What I mean is this: every reading that has entered into the manuscripts of the New Testament has remained there. While some might think that this is bad, it is not, for what it also means is that since no readings “drop out” of the text, the original reading is still there as well! Our task is not, then, impossible, for the original readings are still there — we just need to recognize which of two or three possibilities it is.
CIRCLING BACK TO THOSE MISSING 116 PAGES
Let’s allow Robert M. Bowman Jr. with the Institute for Religious Research to close this discussion on the “Lost Pages.” He concludes:
• If Joseph Smith was inspired to translate the gold plates as he claimed, he should have been able to reproduce the translation of the lost pages by the same inspiration.
• Joseph’s handling of the problem of the missing pages shows that his driving concern was to blunt any criticisms from his detractors, a concern uncharacteristic of genuine prophets of God.
• Joseph’s claim that he had disobeyed God in allowing Martin Harris to take the manuscript home contradicts his claim that the Lord gave him permission to do so.
• The problem of the missing manuscript prompted Joseph to issue his first two modern revelations, in effect transforming him from inspired translator to new prophet.
• The missing manuscript was in all probability destroyed, most likely by Martin’s wife, so that Joseph’s claim that wicked men had the manuscript in their possession and had altered it to make Joseph out to be a fraud is most likely false.
• Had wicked men actually possessed the missing manuscript, it is very unlikely that they would have altered it, since to do so would invite accusations of tampering and they had no reason to think that Joseph could possibly have reproduced the manuscript correctly.
• Joseph’s admission that he tried hard to find the missing manuscript but did not know who had it or where it was is not consistent with his claims that an angel revealed to him the location of the gold plates and that God spoke to him.
• Joseph’s claim, after the loss of the 116 pages, that God had inspired Nephi two thousand years earlier to produce a parallel account in order to circumvent the plot of Joseph’s enemies, is simply too incredible and convenient to take seriously.
Let us not discount independent LDS historian, Don Bradley’s 352 page tome, “The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories.” In the world of interpreting LDS history, you can find almost anything you want in a text if you try hard enough. In many respects, LDS apologetics consists of starting with a certain conclusion and then crafting and interpreting source material in such a way as to support that conclusion. Bradley was disillusioned at one point and found it difficult to understand and explain Joseph Smith and subsequently exited the church and had his records removed from church archives. He drifted further and further away from the Church in which he had been raised, even spending time as an agnostic and atheist, then back to theist, then Baha’i, then generic Protestant. After more studying (whatever that means), he discovered his faith being strengthened and returned to the LDS church.
• If Joseph Smith was inspired to translate the gold plates as he claimed, he should have been able to reproduce the translation of the lost pages by the same inspiration.