The Book of Mormon’s Missing 116 Pages

A Fly in the Ointment, a Black Hole in the Scripture,
and an Embarrassment Too Convenient to Ignore

“If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it.”
— Lucy Harris, wife of Martin Harris, 1828

Introduction: The Wound That Would Not Heal

The morning air over Palmyra, New York, was heavy with midsummer warmth when Martin Harris stumbled into his farmhouse, his face ashen, his breath unsteady. Outside, the fields shimmered with the dew of early light; inside, the stillness shattered as Harris gripped his head in both hands and cried out words that would haunt the unfolding story of American religion: “Oh, I have lost my soul! I have lost my soul!”

Across the wooden table sat Joseph Smith—twenty-two years old, dark-haired, intense—a man caught between divine calling and disaster. What Harris had misplaced, or rather what the world would never see again, were 116 pages of closely written script, the earliest portion of the golden record’s translation. Those pages were more than paper; they were proof of promise, the first fragile bridge between heaven and earth. And now they were gone.

Few moments in the annals of faith have carried such a mixture of dread, irony, and consequence. The saga of the lost manuscript is not a mere footnote—it marks the fault line between prophecy and panic, between a new dispensation and its possible undoing. The story begins in one farmhouse and extends outward through centuries: echoing across revival tents, scholars’ studies, and digital forums where LDS believers and skeptics still wrestle with the same impossible question—was this loss orchestrated by God or born of panic and human error?

To the faithful, the answer resounds as revelation. They see in it a drama of divine foresight, a redemptive plan reaching back through millennia. An ancient prophet—so the story goes—had foreseen this very calamity, crafting another record to preserve the fullness of truth. What looks like disaster thus becomes deliverance; the loss itself transforms into evidence that heaven anticipates human frailty.

But to others, the tale unfolds with darker shadows. They imagine Joseph Smith not as a victim but as an author—cornered by his own creation, desperate to recover control. The missing pages represent, in their view, not a test of faith but a turning point of invention: a fertile imagination salvaging its myth by wrapping failure in the language of prophecy.

This essay moves through both worlds—the luminous and the doubtful—lingering in the threshold where conviction and crisis meet. It listens to the voices of scholars and skeptics alike: to the restorative vision of Don Bradley, the unflinching critiques of Jerald and Sandra Tanner, the wry analyses of modern commentators, and the careful notes of historians who sense that this story, once begun, could never quite be contained.

The stakes, even now, are immense. If the Latter-day Saint account holds, it reveals a sweep of divine choreography spanning twenty-six centuries, a celestial safeguard that redeemed a mortal blunder. But if it does not—if the design was human all along—then what we witness is no miracle, but the improvisation of a gifted young man spinning loss into revelation, and in his audacity, founding a faith that would never again lack for confidence in its own mythology.

Let us begin at the beginning—with the pages themselves.

The Event: What Happened in the Summer of 1828

The historical facts, insofar as they can be reconstructed from early Mormon documents, are relatively uncontested. In February 1828, Martin Harris arrived in Harmony, Pennsylvania, to serve as scribe for Joseph Smith’s alleged translation of the golden plates. By June of that year, approximately 116 pages of manuscript had been produced, representing a portion of the ‘Book of Lehi‘—a text supposedly abridged by the ancient prophet Mormon from the original writings of Lehi, patriarch of the founding family in the Book of Mormon narrative.

Harris, deeply invested emotionally and financially in the project (he would later mortgage his farm to finance the printing of the Book of Mormon), petitioned Joseph to allow him to take the pages home to Manchester, New York, to show them to his skeptical wife, Lucy Harris. Joseph initially refused, claiming divine prohibition. He asked twice more. The third time, the answer changed, and Harris departed with the manuscript under strict conditions of confidentiality.

Three weeks passed without a word. Joseph’s anxiety mounted. His mother, Lucy Mack Smith, later recorded the anguish of the moment when Harris finally reappeared at the Smith home:

“Martin Harris pressed his hands upon his temples, and cried out, in a tone of deep anguish, ‘Oh, I have lost my soul! I have lost my soul!’ Joseph . . . sprang from the table, exclaiming, ‘Martin, have you lost that manuscript? . . .’ ‘Yes, it is gone,’ replied Martin, ‘and I know not where.’ ‘Oh, my God!’ said Joseph, clinching his hands. ‘All is lost! all is lost! What shall I do? I have sinned.'”
— Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 1853, pp. 117–123

Joseph’s reaction—weeping, groaning, pacing the floor until sunset—was by all accounts extreme. Lucy Mack Smith noted that ‘he continued, pacing back and forth, meantime weeping and grieving.’ The pages were never recovered. The most widely accepted theory is that Lucy Harris destroyed them, though this has never been definitively proven. What is certain is that Joseph Smith never retranslated the lost portion, and the Book of Mormon as published in 1830 began instead with a different set of plates—the so-called ‘small plates of Nephi.’

The official Latter-day Saint explanation, recorded in Doctrine and Covenants Section 10, unfolds like a heavenly counterintelligence drama. Joseph Smith declared that the Lord warned him of a “wicked plan”—hatched, allegedly, by those who had stolen or copied the 116 pages—to alter the manuscript and use it to discredit his divine translation. These “wicked men,” whom early Saints identified as skeptics in Palmyra and perhaps even Lucy Harris herself, were said to be lying in wait: once Joseph retranslated the missing section, they would reveal their doctored original and cry “fraud!” before the world.

But, according to the revelation, God had already anticipated the ambush. Long before Joseph Smith or Martin Harris drew breath—indeed, some six centuries before the birth of Christ—Nephi, a visionary prophet on the Old World side of the Book of Mormon story, had been instructed to engrave a second record covering the same years of Nephite history. This “small plates of Nephi” narrative, preserved separately from the “large plates” from which Joseph’s lost pages were drawn, would serve as a prophetic reserve—a backup scripture waiting twenty-six centuries for its appointed hour (1 Nephi 9; D&C 10:38–45).

The logic of the revelation is striking—almost acrobatic. What began as a mortifying blunder was swiftly elevated into a showcase of divine foresight. According to Doctrine and Covenants 10, the calamity had been anticipated ages ago; Nephi himself had written a backup copy before the Book of Mormon’s narrative even began. Yet one can’t help but smile at the celestial chain of command. If heaven could foresee the theft of a nineteenth‑century manuscript twenty‑six centuries in advance, might it not also have whispered a simpler instruction—something like, “Joseph, whatever you do, do not let the translation leave your house”? Such a revelation would have saved angels and ancient prophets a great deal of administrative trouble. But in the Mormon telling, the Almighty preferred the more dramatic route: allowing history to stumble so His providence could stand taller still.

For believers, this became a powerful vindication of providence: a tangible sign that heaven’s design already encompassed every contingency. The event has been memorialized in official Church curriculum and in apologetic works such as Joseph Fielding Smith’s Doctrines of Salvation (1954), which called it “an eternal witness that the Lord prepares the way before His servants.” LDS scholar Robert J. Matthews described it as “an example of divine planning so intricate that it leaves us astonished at the omniscience of God.”

Outside Mormon circles, however, the story is read less as revelation and more as rhetorical reconstruction—a deft narrative that transformed a humiliating personal failure into theology. Historian Fawn Brodie famously called D&C 10 “a brilliant cover for disaster,” while modern analysts like Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe have emphasized its literary coherence as evidence of Joseph Smith’s resourceful imagination under pressure. In either case, Section 10 remains one of the most consequential crisis documents in American religious history—a revelation that managed, with a single sweep of divine foreknowledge, to turn loss into legend.

With this backdrop established, we can now examine the primary theories advanced by LDS scholars to make theological sense of this remarkable chain of events—and the serious doubts each theory raises.

Theory One: The Divine Foreknowledge Theory — God Planned the Backup All Along

The LDS Argument

The most foundational LDS explanation for the missing pages is what might be called the Divine Foreknowledge Theory. Its articulation in Doctrine and Covenants Section 10 is succinct but sweeping: God, knowing that Martin Harris’s carelessness would result in the loss of the manuscript, had inspired the ancient prophet Nephi, roughly 590–570 BCE, to engrave a second, more spiritually focused record covering the same early period of Lehite history. This was the ‘small plates of Nephi.’ When the large plates (the source of the 116 lost pages) were compromised, God simply redirected Joseph to translate the small plates instead.

The BYU religious scholar J.B. Haws has articulated this view with particular care. In his contribution to the Religious Studies Center at Brigham Young University, he also writes about those 116 pages: (highlighted at this author’s discretion).

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.

The argument has undeniable theological elegance. It reframes calamity as choreography—disaster not merely recovered from, but divinely prearranged. In this telling, God’s omniscience becomes a kind of cosmic chess strategy, converting human error into the very proof of His foresight. Latter‑day Saint apologists often underscore this theme, noting that both Nephi and Mormon confessed to recording duplicate histories under inspiration they themselves did not fully comprehend (1 Nephi 9:2, 5; Words of Mormon 1:7). To the faithful interpreter, these scriptural asides form a seamless thread stretching from 600 B.C. to 1828—a revelation so pre‑engineered that even its mishaps stand as points of prophetic confirmation.

Yet one notices that this pattern of retroactive design recurs frequently in LDS apologetic reasoning. When a revelation seems awkward in hindsight, or a doctrine finds itself out of joint with earlier claims, the narrative often bends to accommodate the dissonance, recasting inconvenience as evidence of divine complexity. It is a kind of exegetical aikido: the energy of contradiction itself is used to prove the system’s coherence. What begins as an embarrassment becomes an affirmation, a theological sleight of hand in which foresight and afterthought trade places. The story of the lost 116 pages, then, is only the earliest and perhaps the most artful example of what would become a defining instinct of Mormon apologetics—the creative sanctification of crisis.

The Doubts: Why This Theory Fails to Convince

The Divine Foreknowledge Theory is, on its surface, the most theologically ambitious of the LDS explanations. It is also, upon reflection, among the least credible—not because divine foreknowledge is theologically impossible, but because the specific mechanics of this purported plan strain every reasonable interpretive principle.

The first and most fundamental objection is what critics have long called the ‘seer stone irony.’ Joseph Smith claimed to possess not merely prophetic gifts but practical supernatural tools—a Urim and Thummim, a seer stone, angelic visitations—all of which had apparently guided him to the buried golden plates with precision. The angel Moroni had appeared to him repeatedly. God had spoken to him directly. Given this profile of supernatural capacity, why could God not simply instruct Joseph where the pages were? Or protect them from being stolen in the first place? Robert M. Bowman Jr. of the Institute for Religious Research makes this point with surgical precision:

“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.”
— Robert M. Bowman Jr., Institute for Religious Research

Second, the theory’s internal logic has a peculiar circularity. The reason God purportedly prepared the small plates as a backup was to prevent wicked men from exposing Joseph’s inability to reproduce the original translation. But this assumes Joseph could not reproduce it, which is precisely the critics’ charge. The divine backup plan, in other words, functions perfectly as a theological alibi only if Joseph was not actually translating by divine power. If he were genuinely translating from an extant, divinely preserved text under direct inspiration, he should have been able to reproduce the translation with perfect fidelity, making the elaborate ancient backup unnecessary.

Bowman states this directly: ‘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.’

Third, the theory requires us to believe that God engineered a 2,600-year contingency plan—inspiring a prophet to laboriously engrave metal plates with duplicate content ‘just in case’ a farmer from New York lost some papers in 1828. As one former Mormon put it on the Reddit community r/exmormon with characteristic directness:

“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.”
— Redditor (former Mormon), r/exmormon

Fourth, the shape of the resulting Book of Mormon is itself evidence of a problem. When the Tanners subjected the text to computer analysis in their landmark 1989 study, they discovered something that simple reading would have obscured: the portion of the Book of Mormon that replaced the 116 pages—the ‘small plates’ material—is strikingly sparse in comparison to the later books of the text. The details of kings, wars, cities, genealogies, and chronology that fill the middle and latter portions of the Book of Mormon are conspicuously absent from the replacement material. The Tanners wrote:

“This question aroused our curiosity and we began to look at names, dates, cities, lands, directions, kings, etc. In all of these areas we found an abundance of material in the later books, but scarcely nothing in material coming from the ‘small plates of Nephi.'”
— Jerald and Sandra Tanner, ‘A Black Hole in the Book of Mormon,’ Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1989

If the small plates were a divinely prepared equivalent to the large plates, why are they so dramatically thinner in historical detail? One answer, of course, is the one Nephi himself gives—that the small plates were intended to focus on ‘more spiritual matters.’ But this raises an obvious question: why would God design a backup plan that is, by his own admission, significantly less comprehensive than the original? The ‘victory’ of having a more spiritual text in place of a more historical one begins to look less like providence and more like rationalization.

Theory Two: “Satan’s Conspiracy” — Wicked Men Altered the Manuscript

The LDS Argument

The second major LDS theory concerns not the backup plan, but the reason the original could not be retranslated. According to Doctrine and Covenants Section 10, God explicitly warned Joseph that wicked men had altered the words of the stolen manuscript and were waiting to spring the trap. The revelation states:

“Satan hath put it into their hearts to alter the words which you have caused to be written, or which you have translated. . . . if you should bring forth the same words they will say that you have lied and that you have pretended to translate, but that you have contradicted yourself. And, behold, they will publish this, and Satan will harden the hearts of the people to stir them up to anger against you.”
— Doctrine and Covenants 10:10, 30–32

This conspiracy narrative accomplishes two things simultaneously. It provides a theological reason why Joseph should not retranslate (to avoid walking into a trap), and it preemptively explains away any discrepancy between a hypothetical retranslation and the original pages. The FAIR (Faithful Answers, Informed Responses) organization, the LDS Church’s primary apologetics body, has defended this position extensively, arguing that the scenario, while dramatic, is internally coherent and consistent with what we know of the opponents of early Mormonism.

The Doubts: Why This Theory Fails to Convince

The conspiracy theory has several problems, the most basic of which is forensic. The 116 pages were handwritten in ink on foolscap paper by Martin Harris under Joseph Smith’s dictation. Altering such a document without detection would have been extraordinarily difficult. Any court of law in 1828 would have had little difficulty distinguishing original text from subsequent additions—ink age, handwriting variation, paper condition. The Tanners note this point:

“Critics feel that the simple truth is that Joseph Smith could not reproduce an exact copy of what he had previously written. Therefore, he was forced to come up with the elaborate story about the Lord providing a second set of plates.”
— Jerald and Sandra Tanner, summarizing the critical position, MormonThink

If Lucy Harris or associates had altered the pages, those alterations would have been detectable. And more to the point: why would they alter the pages rather than simply publish them as-is and challenge Joseph to reproduce them verbatim? As Bowman argues:

“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.”
— Robert M. Bowman Jr., Institute for Religious Research

Indeed, the conspiracy theory collapses under the weight of its own logic. If the pages were altered, then producing them would have proven nothing—a responsible investigator would simply note that the pages had been tampered with. If they were not altered (or if they were destroyed), then the threat was hollow from the beginning. The only scenario in which the conspiracy theory makes theological sense is one in which the original pages remained perfectly intact and in hostile hands—yet this scenario was never realized. The pages simply disappeared.

Furthermore, Joseph’s own behavior in the aftermath of the loss undermines the conspiracy narrative. He reportedly searched desperately for the pages and did not know their location—an extraordinary admission for a man who claimed prophetic and supernatural powers of discernment. If he was capable of locating buried golden plates based on angelic direction, why could he not discover who possessed 116 sheets of paper hidden in a dresser drawer in Manchester, New York?

Perhaps most damning of all is the meta-observation about what the conspiracy theory requires us to believe about God. It asks us to accept that the Lord of the universe, omniscient and omnipotent, was sufficiently alarmed by the possibility that Lucy Harris might produce an altered manuscript that he could not simply prevent the plot, expose the conspiracy, or shield his prophet from it—but was instead reduced to working around it via an ancient contingency plan. This is not the God of biblical Christianity, who speaks with prophets face to face. It is something far more constrained.

Theory Three: Providential Substitution — Better Scripture Emerged from the Crisis

The LDS Argument

A third major LDS interpretation moves away from the defensive and toward the triumphalist: the loss of the 116 pages was, in some meaningful sense, a blessing. The small plates material that replaced them is theologically richer, more devotional, more Christ-centered than the historical chronicle of the large plates would have been. The beloved passages of 2 Nephi—Lehi’s dying counsel to his children, Nephi’s great psalm, and Isaiah’s prophecies—would never have appeared in the Book of Mormon if the original 116 pages had been preserved.

Independent LDS historian Don Bradley developed this thesis at length in his 352-page reconstruction, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories. Bradley, who describes more than a decade of historical and scriptural research, argues that the lost pages contained their own rich narrative—including important stories about Lehi’s family, their journey, and the founding generation of Nephite civilization—and that understanding what was lost helps us better appreciate what we have.

“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 Joseph Smith’s translation of the golden plates were forever lost, and the detailed stories they held forgotten over the ensuing years—until now.”
— Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories

Bradley’s work represents the most sophisticated LDS engagement with the lost pages question. He does not dismiss the crisis but enters fully into it, attempting to recover—through careful analysis of surrounding scripture and historical documents—what the original text might have contained. The project is, in a sense, an act of faith expressed through scholarship.

The Doubts: Why This Theory Fails to Convince

The Providential Substitution theory is the most intellectually honest of the three, precisely because it acknowledges the loss rather than explaining it away. Bradley’s project deserves respect. But the theory’s theological implications, when pressed, create new difficulties.

First, the claim that ‘better scripture’ emerged from the crisis is not verifiable in any meaningful sense. We cannot compare the small plates to the lost large plates because we do not have the large plates. The argument that the replacement is superior is necessarily circular—it is made by people who know only the replacement. The same logic could justify any editorial decision by claiming the result was divinely improved.

Second, and more fundamentally, the Providential Substitution theory subtly concedes the central critical point. If the replacement is ‘better’ than the original would have been, that implies that the original was somehow deficient, which, in turn, implies that the Book of Mormon as published is not actually the full, divinely intended record of Nephite civilization, but a version shaped by historical accident. This is a significant theological concession.

Third, Don Bradley’s own remarkable biography introduces legitimate questions about the evidentiary basis for his reconstructions. Bradley himself exited the LDS Church for a period, spending time as an agnostic, atheist, theist, Baha’i, and generic Protestant before returning to Mormonism. While biographical fluctuations do not disqualify scholarship, they do underscore the degree to which Bradley’s conclusions are shaped by a profound desire to find coherence in the LDS narrative. In the world of interpreting LDS history, you can find almost anything in a text if you search long enough. LDS apologetics has a well-documented tendency to begin with a conclusion and work backward through source material to support it.

Finally, as MormonThink’s editors observe, the structure of the resulting Book of Mormon presents peculiarities that the Providential Substitution theory does not adequately address. The text as it stands contains what critics have called ‘a zombie Benjamin’—the prophet Benjamin appears after he has already been described as having passed—and ‘multiple Mosiahs’ in the text’s organization. These are the kinds of editorial seams that appear when a document has been substantially reworked under pressure, not when it has been produced according to an ancient, coherent divine plan.

The Scholarship of Jerald and Sandra Tanner: The Black Hole Theory

No investigation of the 116 pages question is complete without extended engagement with the work of Jerald and Sandra Tanner, the most consequential ex-Mormon researchers of the twentieth century and founders of the Utah Lighthouse Ministry. Their 1989 article, ‘A Black Hole in the Book of Mormon,’ represents a landmark in critical LDS scholarship—one that employs the Church’s own computer-indexed scripture program to demonstrate textual anomalies that no official apologist has fully answered.

The Tanners begin with an astronomical metaphor. A black hole, in physics, is a region of space so gravitationally dense that not even light can escape. It cannot be directly observed—only inferred from its effects on surrounding matter. The Tanners argue that the Book of Mormon contains exactly such a structure: a region where historical content has collapsed into itself, leaving only the gravitational traces of what once existed there.

Their analysis proceeds methodically. They note that the small plates of Nephi—the material covering the period that replaced the 116 lost pages—are strikingly deficient in historical detail compared to the rest of the Book of Mormon. The later books of the text are dense with the names of kings, cities, lands, military commanders, genealogical lines, directional coordinates, and chronological markers. The small plates, by contrast, contain almost none of this. The contrast is not subtle; it is stark.

The Tanners draw on Nephi’s own words to establish the expectation that the large plates (from which the 116 pages were translated) contained extensive historical content:

“Upon the other plates should be engraven an account of the reign of the kings, and the wars and contentions of my people.”
— 1 Nephi 9:4, cited in Tanner, ‘A Black Hole in the Book of Mormon’

The small plates, Nephi himself acknowledges, were designed for a different purpose—a more spiritual one. But the Tanners argue that this explanation, taken seriously, reveals the problem rather than solving it. If the large plates contained the ‘reign of the kings, and the wars and contentions’—precisely the kind of historical detail that fills the middle and latter portions of the Book of Mormon—then the replacement of those pages with the small plates didn’t just lose historical content. It created a massive structural asymmetry in the text.

The latter books of the Book of Mormon read like a history. The replacement material for the 116 pages reads like a sermon. They do not represent the same kind of document, which means they are not, in any meaningful sense, equivalent. The divine backup plan, if it existed, did not produce an equivalent text—it produced a qualitatively different kind of text, with the historical scaffolding conspicuously absent.

The Tanners draw the natural conclusion: that the 116 pages, if they existed as Joseph described, would have contained a wealth of specific historical detail—names, places, dates, kings, wars—that Joseph was simply unable to reproduce from memory. The ‘small plates,’ with their vague spiritual content and minimal historical particulars, were easier to generate without fear of contradiction precisely because they contained so little verifiable information.

Fawn Brodie, the most famous biographical critic of Joseph Smith, had reached a similar conclusion decades earlier:

“Despairingly, Joseph 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.'”
— Fawn Brodie, cited in IndieMoremon.com, ‘Lost 116: How It Should Have Ended’

The Tanners go further, noting that if a genuine ancient text had been lost and a genuine ancient backup had been consulted, we would expect the replacement to reflect the same historical density as the surrounding material—or at least a consistent literary character. Instead, the boundary between the small plates and the rest of the Book of Mormon is clearly visible to any careful reader: a transition from devotional poetry and theological argument to historical narrative so abrupt that it reads like a change of author, not a divinely prepared continuation.

Jerald Tanner and Sandra Tanner’s broader conclusion about the 116 pages, drawn from their extensive analysis, was this: the episode does not merely raise doubts about Joseph Smith’s prophetic credibility. It suggests that Smith was ‘not a misguided individual who believed in his own creative imagination but was at least minimally aware of his own deception’—a man who knew exactly why he could not retranslate what he had originally produced.

In the decades since the Tanners first advanced their analysis, Latter‑day Saint apologists have expended enormous energy—and no small mountain of words—attempting to dismantle it. Entire essays, conference papers, and online symposiums have been devoted to refuting Jerald and Sandra Tanner’s claims regarding the 116 pages, often with studied indignation and enough footnotes to fell a small forest. Yet for all their volume, these responses tend to excel more in polemic than in substance. They frequently marshal appeals to faith, narrative plausibility, or broad assertions about “ancient literary structure,” but stop short of answering the Tanners’ central contention: that a truly ancient replacement text would bear the unmistakable fingerprints of antiquity, not the tonal discontinuities of a nineteenth‑century composition. The apologetic rebuttals, in this sense, resemble elaborate rhetorical fortifications built around an undefended core—impressive from a distance, but hollow upon inspection.

General Doubts and the Response of LDS Apologetics

Beyond the three major theories, several general critical observations about the 116 pages warrant attention—along with the best available LDS responses and the residual questions those responses leave unanswered.

The Problem of Divine Permission

One of the most theologically curious aspects of the episode is that God reportedly told Joseph ‘no’ twice before saying ‘yes’ to Martin Harris’s request. Doctrine and Covenants Section 10 then treats the loss of the pages as the result of Joseph’s disobedience in allowing Harris to take them. But if God permitted the third asking, in what sense was Joseph disobedient? The revelation seems to hold Joseph responsible for following divine instruction.

Bowman identifies this contradiction directly: ‘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.’ LDS apologists have attempted to resolve this by distinguishing between God’s permissive will and his directive will—arguing that God permitted the action while knowing it was spiritually harmful, as a lesson in consequences. This is a theologically reasonable distinction in principle, but it raises the question of why the lesson was so expensive. An infant child’s life was at stake—Emma Smith nearly died in childbirth during this period, and their baby did not survive. The price of Joseph’s lesson in obedience was paid primarily by others.

The Problem of the Seer Stone

Joseph Smith claimed to translate the Book of Mormon by peering into a seer stone placed in a hat, into which he would then bury his face to read illuminated characters. Witnesses consistently described this method. Critically, Joseph did not even need the golden plates present during translation—he reportedly translated with the plates covered or absent. Given this remarkable supernatural mechanism, why could he not locate the missing pages? And if the seer stone functioned reliably enough to produce 116 pages of text, why did its functionality apparently fail to warn him about the danger of allowing Harris to take the manuscript?

The Problem of ‘Wicked Men’ Who Never Appeared

The Doctrine and Covenants 10 account assumes the existence of a shadowy band of conspirators—“wicked men,” as the revelation puts it—who supposedly possessed the missing manuscript and lay in wait, ready to humiliate the prophet by revealing doctored copies once he retranslated the text. Yet the historical record is utterly silent on their existence. Not a whisper of corroboration has surfaced in any diary, newspaper, or local correspondence from Palmyra or Harmony—not even the kind of half‑remembered gossip one might expect if such a malicious scheme were ever rumored. The alleged trap was never sprung. No one ever produced the 116 pages—altered, forged, or otherwise—to expose Joseph Smith’s translation. The conspirators, having apparently taken extreme pains to orchestrate the ruin of a prophetic mission, simply vanished from the stage before delivering their climactic blow.

If we take the LDS position at face value, this forces an odd conclusion: that these “wicked men,” having plotted the theological downfall of a prophet of God, lost interest at the very moment of triumph. It is as though villains from a divine morality play exited in mid‑scene, scripts unfinished, leaving posterity to assume their plan was foiled by omniscience. But if we accept the critical reading, the explanation becomes far less baroque: there were no conspirators, only a mislaid manuscript and a revelation devised afterward to fill the void. In this light, Section 10 reads less like a record of historical intrigue than a work of theological damage control—an inspired answer to a problem that, in all likelihood, never existed anywhere outside the prophet’s own anxiety.

The Problem of the First Modern Revelations

Bowman makes another observation that deserves extended reflection: the crisis of the 116 pages was the occasion for Joseph Smith to issue his first substantial divine revelations—D&C Sections 3 and 10—effectively transforming him from a translator to a prophet. The timing is significant. The loss of the pages, which might have discredited Joseph entirely, instead catalyzed a dramatic expansion of his prophetic role and authority. He emerged from the crisis not diminished but elevated, no longer merely the instrument of an ancient text but a new prophet receiving fresh divine communication.

Critics see in this pattern the hallmark of a skilled religious entrepreneur: the ability to convert crisis into opportunity, to reframe disaster as divine discipline, and to emerge from each challenge with expanded, rather than diminished, authority. The observation is not conclusive, but it is suggestive.

Humorous Anecdotes and Off-Beat Observations

It would be a disservice to the inherent comedy of this episode not to acknowledge that observers across the spectrum—faithful, skeptical, and entirely uninvested—have found the 116 pages saga to be irresistibly funny in certain respects. The humor is not malicious; it emerges naturally from the collision of high theological claims with very ordinary human failure.

The ‘Plan B’ Joke: A recurring observation is that the entire saga functions theologically as a cosmic ‘director’s cut’ scenario—God, dissatisfied with the first draft’s excessive genealogy and warfare, allowed the boring version to be lost and substituted something more spiritually satisfying. As one internet commentator put it, the lost pages were ‘just a boring list of begats, so He allowed them to be lost to fix it in post.’

The ‘Backup Drive’ Remark: Perhaps the most pointed of the comedic observations concerns divine information management. The claim that God prepared a backup set of plates 2,600 years in advance has led many observers to quip that the Almighty appears to have an extraordinary cloud backup system—prepared millennia before cloud storage was conceived—but was apparently unable to prevent the original document from being stolen in the first place. Or, as others note, God had a backup prepared, but no password protection on the original.

Lucy Harris vs. the Devil: Lucy Harris, who is almost universally believed to have taken or destroyed the pages, has achieved a curious folk-hero status in critical Mormon historiography. The observation that a farmer’s wife from upstate New York was apparently more effective at frustrating the ‘Restoration of all things’ than Satan himself has struck many as deliciously ironic. She has been portrayed in online memes as having ‘more power than the adversary, successfully thwarting the restoration of all things by simply putting the manuscript in her dresser drawer.’

The Seer Stone Problem: Critics have long noted the specific irony that Joseph Smith reportedly used a seer stone to locate buried treasure and later to translate golden plates—yet that same instrument apparently failed to locate 116 sheets of paper in Harris’s New York house. This has prompted considerable commentary: if the stone could find plates buried in a hill, why couldn’t it find a manuscript in a bedroom?

Martin’s Three Asks: The dynamic of Harris asking three times before receiving permission has a darkly comic quality familiar to anyone who has watched a child badger a parent into an ill-advised decision. The humor centers on the parent-child dynamic of someone asking until the parent gives in just to get some peace, resulting in catastrophe. That the God of the universe apparently operates on the same permissive parenting model as an exhausted father at a toy store is, to put it mildly, theologically surprising.

The ‘Zombie Benjamin’ Problem: Because the replacement text was added to the beginning of the published Book of Mormon while following the end of the translated sequence, careful readers have noted that the prophet Benjamin appears alive in the small plates section after already having been described as aging and passing authority to his successors in the chronologically later (but textually earlier) portion of the text. Online commentators have dubbed this the ‘Zombie Benjamin’ problem, noting that the structural seams of the editorial patchwork are visible even to casual readers.

The Broader Context: 116 Pages and the Credibility of Mormon Scripture

The 116 pages episode does not stand alone. It sits within a broader pattern of historical and textual challenges to the Book of Mormon’s claims to divine origin—challenges that range from the anachronistic presence of horses, steel, and chariots in a pre-Columbian American context, to the wholesale incorporation of King James Version New Testament texts into supposed ancient writings that predate the New Testament by centuries.

The missing pages crisis intersects with the reliability of the Bible question in another way. Joseph Smith taught—and the LDS Church officially maintains—that the Bible has been corrupted through transmission and that many ‘plain and precious things’ have been removed from it. This claim is central to the LDS narrative: the Restoration was necessary precisely because the original Christian scriptures had been compromised. But the 116 pages incident raises an obvious parallel question: if the scriptures of the Restoration were vulnerable enough to be lost, altered, or replaced within months of their production, what confidence should we have that the remaining text has been reliably transmitted?

James White, in his rigorous defense of biblical textual reliability in Letters to a Mormon Elder, observes that the New Testament is supported by over 5,000 Greek manuscripts, with 75% of the text free of any textual variation whatsoever, and 95% of the remaining variations resolvable by standard methods of textual criticism. The Book of Mormon, by contrast, began with a manuscript of which 116 pages went missing within months, and the response was not to retranslate, but to abandon that portion of the text permanently.

The irony is acute. The religion that accuses Christianity of having an unreliable scripture was unable, within its first year, to preserve its own foundational text.

The Only True Church and the Fractured Movement

The 116 pages crisis also finds its proper context within the larger question of LDS claims to unique divine authority. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints claims to be, in the words of Doctrine and Covenants 1:30, ‘the only true and living church upon the face of the whole earth.’ This claim, bold as it is, sits uneasily beside the historical record of Mormon institutional fragmentation.

Wikipedia’s entry on Latter Day Saint denominational history notes that following Joseph Smith’s death in 1844, the movement fractured into numerous competing factions—with the Utah-based LDS Church under Brigham Young, the Community of Christ under Joseph Smith III, and a variety of smaller groups each claiming legitimate succession. The fracturing has continued: Sidney Rigdon, James Strang, Alpheus Cutler, Granville Hedrick, William Bickerton, and Charles B. Thompson all founded organizations that persist in some form to the present day.

From its founding, Mormonism itself has been a source of endless infights 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.

Wikipedia provides the specifics:

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.

A church that claims exclusive divine authorization, yet loses its founding scripture within its first year and then fractures into dozens of competing denominations within two decades of its founder’s death, presents an unusual profile for an institution claiming divine protection and guidance.

Conclusion: What the Missing Pages Tell Us

In February 1828, 116 pages of the foundational scripture of a new American religion were produced under extraordinary circumstances and then lost—presumed destroyed—within months of their creation. The theological response to this loss has been elaborate, sophisticated, and in many respects admirable in its ingenuity. But it has not resolved the fundamental questions the loss raises.

Robert Bowman Jr. summarizes the critical case with characteristic concision:

“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.”
— Robert M. Bowman Jr., Institute for Religious Research

This is not the conclusion of a man who has not engaged the evidence. It is the conclusion of a scholar who has engaged it carefully and found it wanting. The divine foreknowledge theory requires a God more concerned with editorial elegance than prophetic protection. Satan’s conspiracy theory requires wicked men who never appear with their evidence. The Providential Substitution theory requires us to celebrate the loss of historical content as a theological improvement.

The Tanners’ Black Hole theory remains the most textually grounded of the critical analyses. The stark contrast between the sparse, devotional small plates and the dense, historical later portions of the Book of Mormon is precisely what we would expect to find if the replacement text was produced by a man who could not reproduce the specific historical details of his original narrative, and who therefore chose a different kind of text—one with far fewer falsifiable specifics.

None of this definitively proves that Joseph Smith was a fraud. The tools of historical criticism can establish probability and plausibility, not certainty. What they can establish is this: the most natural, parsimonious reading of the available evidence—the shape of the resulting text, the behavior of the principal actors, the internal contradictions of the divine explanations, and the convenient timing of subsequent revelations—points not toward an ancient divine plan executed with providential precision, but toward a human being scrambling to recover from a catastrophic mistake, and succeeding rather brilliantly.

Lucy Harris, who may have taken those pages to expose what she suspected was a fraud, achieved something she did not intend: she produced a puzzle so theologically loaded that it has animated two centuries of scholarly debate, apologetic ingenuity, and earnest faith. The pages are gone. But the questions they raise have never been more alive.

For the serious student of religion—Christian or otherwise—the episode of the lost 116 pages stands as a near‑perfect case study in how faith traditions metabolize failure. It reveals, in microcosm, the psychological and theological mechanisms by which religious movements transform crisis into confirmation, converting what might appear to outsiders as collapse into proof of divine orchestration. One can almost hear the familiar cadence of history echoing through it: from seventeenth‑century millenarians who recalculated the world’s end after every missed apocalypse, to the Millerite followers of 1844 who, after the so‑called “Great Disappointment,” gathered the morning after Christ’s non‑appearance to announce that the prophecy was merely spiritually fulfilled—or that a new date, blessedly more accurate, was just ahead.

Such moments share a common theological reflex: the conviction that error itself testifies to the inscrutable wisdom of God. The unexplained becomes the unexplainable, and the unexplainable becomes a sacred mystery. In the same way, the loss of Joseph Smith’s manuscript was quickly re‑contextualized—not as a breakdown in prophetic process, but as evidence of a divine plan stretching back twenty‑six centuries. Whether one perceives that transformation as inspiring resilience or as ingenious revisionism depends largely on perspective. Believers see revelation; skeptics see improvisation. And between those views lies the enduring fascination of Mormon origins—a portrait of faith not static or serene, but perpetually rewriting the meaning of its own missteps. But no honest engagement with the history of Mormonism can avoid the question Lucy Harris posed with such devastating simplicity nearly two hundred years ago:

“If this be a divine communication, the same being who revealed it to you can easily replace it.”
— Lucy Harris, 1828

Joseph Smith’s answer to that challenge—elaborate, internally contradictory, theologically ambitious, and ultimately impossible to verify—is, in many respects, the founding document of modern Mormon apologetics. It established the pattern that has been followed ever since: when the evidence goes against the faith, reframe the evidence as part of the plan.

Whether that pattern is the signature of a living religion’s resilience or of a founding fraud’s resourcefulness is, perhaps, the question that the missing pages were always meant to answer—and the reason why their absence matters so much.

— End —

Primary Sources and References

Lucy Mack Smith, Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, 1853. | Jerald and Sandra Tanner, ‘A Black Hole in the Book of Mormon,’ Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1989. Available at utlm.org. | J.B. Haws, ‘The Lost 116 Pages Story,’ BYU Religious Studies Center, rsc.byu.edu. | Robert M. Bowman Jr., ‘The Lost 116 Pages and the Book of Mormon,’ Institute for Religious Research, mit.irr.org. | Fawn Brodie, No Man Knows My History, Knopf, 1945. | Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories, Greg Kofford Books, 2019. | Doctrine and Covenants, Sections 3 and 10. | MormonThink.com, ‘The Lost 116 Pages.’ | LDS Discussions, ‘116 Pages Overview,’ ldsdiscussions.com. | FAIR Latter-day Saints, ‘The Lost 116 Pages,’ fairlatterdaysaints.org. | James R. White, Letters to a Mormon Elder, Bethany House, 1993.