Why Joseph Smith was a prophet

The 1830 edition ran 588 pages. Its narrators, migrations, wars, sermons, calendars, flashbacks, letters, genealogies, and embedded records hold together across a book longer than most modern novels.

The surviving manuscript and dated documents place the main translation from early April through the end of June 1829. The text was spoken to scribes. It was not typed, revised on a computer, or assembled over a long publishing career.

The original manuscript was written rapidly with little punctuation. Its corrections and hearing errors fit a spoken text moving from Joseph’s mouth to a scribe’s pen.

About twenty-eight percent of the original manuscript survives. The printer worked from a second handwritten copy, and the typesetter supplied most of the punctuation and paragraphing for the first edition.

Three witnesses testified of an angelic manifestation. Eight testified that Joseph showed them the plates and that they handled and examined them.

Several witnesses later broke with Joseph or left the Church, sometimes bitterly. They still continued to affirm their Book of Mormon testimony instead of exposing a conspiracy.

Joseph’s text places Nahom on an Arabian route, near the point where an eastward turn becomes geographically workable. The name is tied to burial and mourning in the narrative.

Excavations in Yemen uncovered ancient altars bearing the consonants NHM, connected with the Nihm tribal region and dating to the general world of Lehi. The site lies near the route’s natural eastward turn.

The Book of Mormon names Lehi’s wife Sariah and gives the name Alma to two prominent men. Neither choice looked obvious to Joseph’s English-speaking world.

Jewish Aramaic records from Elephantine preserve a form of Sariah as a woman’s name. A Hebrew deed from the Judean Desert names “Alma son of Judah.”

Alma 7:10 says Jesus would be born “at Jerusalem which is the land of our forefathers.” The Book of Mormon regularly treats cities as centers of surrounding lands.

The Amarna letters speak of a settlement belonging to the land or territory of Jerusalem. The supposedly embarrassing phrase fits an attested ancient Near Eastern way of describing geography.

Nephi says he made a record using the language of his father and the learning of the Egyptians. Mormon later describes the record as written in “reformed Egyptian.”

Papyrus Amherst 63 preserves Aramaic, a Semitic language, written in Demotic Egyptian characters. Other ancient communities also adapted one writing system to preserve another language.

In Moses 6, a man named Mahijah comes to Enoch with questions. Joseph’s wider Enoch account includes heavenly books, rebellious powers, cosmic judgment, divine grief, a translated holy community, and its future return.

The fragmentary Book of Giants recovered at Qumran includes Mahaway, a messenger who travels to Enoch seeking an interpretation of troubling visions. The name, role, destination, and Enochic setting form a remarkably specific cluster.

Joseph taught premortal life, a heavenly council, human agency, a fortunate Fall, universal resurrection, salvation for the dead, degrees of glory, eternal families, deification through Christ, and temple ascent into God’s presence.

Biblical scholarship and the recovery of early Jewish and Christian texts have made the divine council, theosis, ascent, ritual clothing, proxy salvation, and a populated premortal world far less foreign than they sounded to nineteenth-century Protestants.