William L. Davis - Visions in a Seer Stone: Joseph Smith and the Making of the Book of Mormon

My interest in the Book of Mormon began in childhood, though not initially from any personal desire or intense curiosity. Whenever I asked my mother to tell me bedtime stories, she almost never regaled me with magical fairytales. Much to my chagrin, she rather told me countless stories about our familys Mormon pioneer ancestors, interspersed with tales of ancient Christian prophets and warriors from the pages of the Book of Mormon. Nevertheless, though hobbits, elves, and wizards were more congruent with my youthful tastes, I began to appreciate the stories and messages in the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith, the prophet of the Latter Day Saint movement, claimed that the ancient American epic was the the most correct of any book on earth. Such a confident declaration influenced me to embrace the work literally and wholeheartedly, to study its stories in painstaking detail, trusting that every passage, every verse, every word had the potential to unlock the mysteries of God. I examined the language, the turns of phrases, the rhythms, the stories, and the messages. I created my own timelines for narratives, traced out the sermon topics of ancient prophets, sketched maps of the cities and battles, built genealogy charts, and memorized select verses. Because my core beliefs ultimately anchored on the Book of Mormon, no other text was more important to me, and I dedicated my time and resources to understanding it to the best of my ability.

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, and though I continued my study of the Book of Mormon, I began to withdraw from active participation in the Mormon faith. A variety of reasons contributed to my decision, ranging from my own evolving spirituality to concerns about the leadership of the LDS Church (officially the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly known simply as the Mormons) and the direction in which the institution was heading. Over the next several years, I moved from being an active and devout believer to a nonparticipant. Today, having now passed the half-century mark of age, I have spent more of my life on the far perimeter of the faith than within it. Even so, throughout all these developments, I have continued to read and examine the Book of Mormon. Such dedication ultimately derives from, and continues to reflect, a personal interest in the origins of my identity and how the Book of Mormon played a fundamental role during my formative years.

For me and many other people growing up in the faith, Mormonism represented much more than a religious organization. The church stood at the center of life, shaping ones sense of identity (for this life and the next), ones relationship to God and to other people, and ones values and beliefs. I saw the world through a very specific Mormon cultural lens, a lens so concentrating and all-encompassing that I was not aware of its ubiquitous presence framing every aspect of life. Neither was I aware that the paradigm was a cultural construct, comprised of a set of unquestioned premises that shaped how I viewed and interpreted the world. All facets of life ultimately revolved around the LDS faith and the culture it created, and the Book of Mormon sat at the center of that universe, anchoring and validating every aspect of life. For me personally, understanding the text therefore became a central preoccupation. Understanding how Joseph Smith produced the work directly correlated to understanding the construction of my own identity and how the specific spiritual and cultural inheritances of my childhood shaped my life and worldview.

I share this personal background for a reason. As Paul C. Gutjahr observes in The Book of Mormon: A Biography, the history of scholarship on the Book of Mormon has largely fallen into two camps: Mormon educational and apologetic texts and Evangelical works attacking the books veracity. Thus, almost by default, scholars of the Book of Mormon, at least in the past, have often been shuffled into one of two opposing categories: defenders of the faith or critics of the church. Given such circumstances, my past participation in the LDS Church will most certainly influence the ways in which some readers perceive this work and respond to this study. Nevertheless, this project is not a devotional effort; it is not invested in either proving or disproving religious claims. I do not aspire to participate in the former (and, unfortunately, sometimes still current) parochial and polemical battles between the defenders and critics of Mormon beliefs.

For my part, I am positioning this project within the rising academic field of Mormon studies, with a specific emphasis on evidentiary support for claims and a conscious avoidance of church doctrines and official beliefs. In recent years, many academic scholarsscholars who have no desire either to support or attack Mormonisms religious claimshave taken an interest in the Book of Mormon as a legitimate object of historical study, particularly when considering how the text informs (and is informed by) our understanding of religious history and various aspects of early American culture. As Laurie F. Maffly-Kipp argues, For any reader wanting to learn more about the history of American religion, the Book of Mormon is an indispensable document.I see this work as part of that academic project. Regardless of what one believes about its historical or sacral authenticity, the Book of Mormon reveals important information about nineteenth-century American culture, particularly regarding oral culture and the formation of American literature among the non-elite classes of democratic-minded citizens, whose voices often emerged through the spoken word along religious avenues and byways.

Readers hoping for a study that debunks Joseph Smith and attacks the Book of Mormon will be disappointed with this work. This is not to say, however, that I will not be challenging some of the unofficial, nondoctrinal traditions and theories surrounding the text. In an effort to distance Smith from the authorship of the Book of Mormon, a segment of Mormon scholars has attempted to downplay or even erase nineteenth-century influences on the work. While such efforts might be understandable, at least from a religious point of view that seeks to limit inquiries into the nature and origin of ones sacred text, I believe such efforts are ultimately misguided and lead to faulty perceptions and self-imposed blind spots about the past. Some argue, for example, that Smith was too illiterate, unschooled, and ignorant to have composed the Book of Mormon. While Smiths formal educational opportunities were, in fact, limited and sporadic, a close examination of the evidence nevertheless reveals that such claims derive from anecdotal accounts and problematic representations, undermining the stability of such assertions as accurate depictions of his supposed lack of ability. Objectivity and impartial evaluations never appeared to be the goal in such accounts. The context of such claims inevitably reflects the desires and perceptions of the speakers describing Smith, rather than an attempt to provide objective information about his actual skills, knowledge, or capabilities.