The "lost 116 pages" were the original manuscript pages of what
Joseph Smith
Joseph Smith Jr. (December 23, 1805June 27, 1844) was an American religious and political leader and the founder of Mormonism and the Latter Day Saint movement. Publishing the Book of Mormon at the age of 24, Smith attracted tens of thou ...
, founder of the
Latter Day Saint movement
The Latter Day Saint movement (also called the LDS movement, LDS restorationist movement, or Smith–Rigdon movement) is the collection of independent church groups that trace their origins to a Christian Restorationist movement founded by ...
, 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
The Book of Mormon is a religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement, first published in 1830 by Joseph Smith as ''The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi''.
The book is one of ...
without retranslating the Book of Lehi, replacing it with what he said was an abridgment taken from the
Plates of Nephi.
Background
Joseph Smith said that on September 22, 1827, he had recovered a set of buried
golden plates in
a prominent hill near his parents' farm in
Manchester, New York
Manchester is a town in Ontario County, New York, United States. The population was 9,406 at the 2020 census. The town was named after one of its villages, which in turn was named after the city of Manchester in England. It was formed in 1822 f ...
. Martin Harris, a respectable but superstitious farmer from nearby
Palmyra
Palmyra ( ; Palmyrene dialect, Palmyrene: (), romanized: ''Tadmor''; ) is an ancient city in central Syria. It is located in the eastern part of the Levant, and archaeological finds date back to the Neolithic period, and documents first menti ...
, became an early believer and gave Smith $50 () to finance the translation of the plates.
Lucy Harris, Martin's wife, also donated some of her own money and offered to give more, even though Smith denied her request to see the plates and told her that "in relation to assistance, I always prefer dealing with men rather than their wives."
Smith and his wife,
Emma, moved to her hometown of
Harmony, Pennsylvania
Harmony is a Borough (Pennsylvania), borough in Butler County, Pennsylvania, United States. The population was 890 at the 2010 census. It is located approximately north of Pittsburgh.
Geography
Harmony is located in southwestern Butler County ...
, in late October 1827, where he began dictating the Book of Mormon. When Harris left Palmyra to visit Smith without taking his wife along, she became suspicious that Smith intended to defraud her and her husband.
When Harris returned, Lucy refused to share his bed, and she had a suitor of her daughter surreptitiously copy the characters on the
Anthon transcript that Smith had given to Harris. Lucy then accompanied her husband back to Harmony in April 1828, when Martin agreed to serve as Smith's scribe. Before returning home after two weeks, Lucy searched the Smith house and grounds for the plates but was unable to locate them. Smith said he did not need their physical presence to create the transcription and that they were hidden in nearby woods.
Harris as Smith's scribe
From April to June 1828, Harris acted as Smith's scribe as Smith dictated the manuscript using the
Urim and Thummim
In the Hebrew Bible, the Urim ( ''ʾŪrīm'', "lights") and the Thummim ( ''Tummīm'', "perfection" or "truth") are elements of the '' hoshen'', the breastplate worn by the High Priest attached to the ephod, a type of apron or garment. The pair ...
and
seer stones. By the middle of June, Smith had dictated about 116 manuscript pages of text.
Harris continued to have doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript, and he "could not forget his wife's skepticism or the hostile queries of Palmyra's tavern crowd." Smith's mother,
Lucy
Lucy is an English language, English feminine given name derived from the Latin masculine given name Lucius with the meaning ''as of light'' (''born at dawn or daylight'', maybe also ''shiny'', or ''of light complexion''). Alternative spellings ar ...
, "said that Harris asked Joseph for a look at the plates, for 'a further witness of their actual existence and that he might be better able to give a reason for the hope that was within him.' When that request was denied, he asked about the manuscript. Could he at least take it home to reassure his wife?" After denying his request twice, Smith, with a great deal of uneasiness, said that the Lord had given permission, and he allowed Harris to take the manuscript pages back to Palmyra on condition that he show them to only five named family members. He even made Harris bind himself in a solemn oath.
The manuscript disappears
When Harris returned home, he showed the manuscript to his wife, who allowed him to lock them in her bureau. Harris then showed the pages not only to the named relatives but "to any friend who came along." On one occasion Harris picked the lock of the bureau and damaged it, irritating his wife. The manuscript then disappeared.
Shortly after Harris left Harmony, Smith's wife gave birth to Smith's firstborn son, who was "very much deformed" and died less than a day after delivery.
Emma Smith
Emma Hale Smith Bidamon (July 10, 1804 – April 30, 1879) was a leader in the early Latter Day Saint movement and a prominent member of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (RLDS Church) as well as the first wife of Josep ...
nearly died herself, and Smith tended her for two weeks. As she slowly gained strength, Smith left her in the care of her mother and went back to Palmyra in search of Harris and the manuscript.
The following day Harris was dragged into the Smith family home in distress and without the pages. Smith urged Harris to search his house again, but Harris told him he had already ripped open beds and pillows. Smith moaned, "Oh, my God! ... All is lost! all is lost! What shall I do? I have sinned—it is I who tempted the wrath of God".
After returning to
Harmony
In music, harmony is the concept of combining different sounds in order to create new, distinct musical ideas. Theories of harmony seek to describe or explain the effects created by distinct pitches or tones coinciding with one another; harm ...
without Harris, Smith dictated to Emma his first written
revelation
Revelation, or divine revelation, is the disclosing of some form of Religious views on truth, truth or Knowledge#Religion, knowledge through communication with a deity (god) or other supernatural entity or entities in the view of religion and t ...
, which both rebuked Smith and denounced Harris as "a wicked man." The revelation assured Smith that if he was penitent he would regain his ability to translate.
It is unclear if or when the angel returned the interpreters to Smith. In 1838, Smith said, "Immediately after my return home
o Harmony, Pennsylvania, in about July,I was walking out a little distance, when Behold the former heavenly messenger appeared and handed to me the
Urim and Thummin." Smith said he used the interpreters to receive a revelation (today known as Section 3 of the
Doctrine and Covenants
The Doctrine and Covenants (sometimes abbreviated and cited as D&C or D. and C.) is a part of the open scriptural canon of several denominations of the Latter Day Saint movement. Originally published in 1835 as Doctrine and Covenants of the Chur ...
); then the angel again took away the plates and interpreters before returning them a few days later. Nevertheless, Lucy Smith's recollection was that an angel had promised that the plates and interpreters would be returned to Smith on September 22, 1828, if he were sufficiently worthy, and David Whitmer and Emma Smith said that the interpreters were not returned at all but that Smith thereafter used one of his seer stones to interpret the plates.
Resumed writing and the witnesses
Between the loss of the pages during the summer of 1828 and the rapid completion of the Book of Mormon in the spring of 1829, there was a period of quiescence as if Smith were waiting "for help or direction." In April 1829, Smith was joined by
Oliver Cowdery
Oliver H. P. Cowdery (October 3, 1806 – March 3, 1850) was an American religious leader who, with Joseph Smith, was an important participant in the formative period of the Latter Day Saint movement between 1829 and 1836. He was the first bapt ...
, a fellow Vermonter and a distant relation who replaced Harris as scribe. The pace of the writing then increased so dramatically that, within two months, nearly the entire remainder of the manuscript of the
Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is a religious text of the Latter Day Saint movement, first published in 1830 by Joseph Smith as ''The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi''.
The book is one of ...
was completed.
According to Smith, he did not retranslate the material that Harris had lost because he said that if he did, evil men would alter the manuscript in an effort to discredit him. Smith said that instead, he had been divinely ordered to replace the lost material with Nephi's account of the same events. When Smith reached the end of the book, he said he was told that God had foreseen the loss of the early manuscript and had prepared the same history in an abridged format that emphasized religious history, the Small Plates of Nephi. Smith transcribed this portion, and it appears as the first part of the book. When published in 1830, the Book of Mormon contained a statement about the lost 116 pages, as well as the Testimony of
Three Witnesses and the Testimony of
Eight Witnesses
The Eight Witnesses were one of the two groups of witnesses who made statements stating that they had seen the golden plates which Joseph Smith said was his source material for the Book of Mormon. An earlier group of witnesses who said they had ...
, who claimed to have seen and handled the
golden plates. According to
Jeffrey R. Holland, an
apostle
An apostle (), in its literal sense, is an emissary. The word is derived from Ancient Greek ἀπόστολος (''apóstolos''), literally "one who is sent off", itself derived from the verb ἀποστέλλειν (''apostéllein''), "to se ...
in
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, informally known as the LDS Church or Mormon Church, is a Nontrinitarianism, nontrinitarian Restorationism, restorationist Christianity, Christian Christian denomination, denomination and the ...
(LDS Church), "it was not tit for tat, this for that—you give me 116 pages of manuscript and I'll give you 142 pages of printed text. Not so: We got back more than we lost. And it was known from the beginning that it would be so."
Nevertheless, the loss of the manuscript provided opponents of Mormonism, such as the 19th-century clergyman M. T. Lamb, with additional reasons to dismiss the religion as a fraud.
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.
Martin Harris was permitted by Smith to be one of the Three Witnesses. He mortgaged his farm for $3,000 () as security in the event that the Book of Mormon did not sell, and when in fact, it did not, he lost both his farm and his wife. He later disavowed Joseph Smith, left the church, joined several different varieties of early Mormon-related congregations, then at 87 joined the LDS Church and recanted what he had earlier said about Smith. He never disavowed the gold plates, however.
[On his death bed, Harris said,"The Book of Mormon is no fake. I know what I know. I have seen what I have seen, and I have heard what I have heard. I have seen the gold plates from which the Book of Mormon is written. An angel appeared to me and others and testified to the truthfulness of the record, and had I been willing to have perjured myself and sworn falsely to the testimony I now bear I could have been a rich man, but I could not have testified other than I have done and am now doing for these things are true."Martin Harris Cited by George Godfrey as "Testimony of Martin Harris", from an unpublished manuscript copy in the possession of his descendants, quoted in Eldin Ricks, ''The Case of the Book of Mormon Witnesses'' (Salt Lake City: Deseret News Press, 1971), 65–66.]
See also
* "
All About Mormons"
*
Mosiah priority
Notes
References
#. See also:
Mormonism Unvailed
#.
# ; republished in .
# .
#.
#. See also:
History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
The history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has three main periods, described generally as:
# the early history during the lifetime of Joseph Smith, which is in common with most Latter Day Saint movement churches; ...
#. See also:
Biographical Sketches of Joseph Smith the Prophet, and His Progenitors for Many Generations
#.
#.
#.
#.
#
Further reading
*
*
*.
*A chapter fro
M. T. Lamb, ''The Golden Bible'' (1887) an early skeptical view of the lost manuscript problem.
*A modern skeptical analysis of th
*An apologetic response from FAIR to criticism
about the 116 lost pages
External links
{{Latter Day Saint movement
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1828 in the United States
19th-century Christian texts
19th-century manuscripts
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Books of the Book of Mormon
History of the Latter Day Saint movement
Latter Day Saint terms
Mormonism-related controversies
Lost documents