Lost 116 pages

The "lost 116 pages" were the original manuscript pages of what Joseph Smith, Jr. 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 claimed was an abridgment taken from the "Plates of Nephi." [ [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/1_ne/1/17 1 Nephi 1:17] ]

Background

On September 22 1827, Joseph Smith, Jr. said he recovered a set of buried Golden Plates in a prominent hill near his parents' farm in Manchester, New York. Martin Harris, a respectable but superstitious [A biographer of Harris wrote that his "imagination was excitable and fecund." Harris once imagined that a sputtering candle was the work of the devil. He told a friend that he had met Jesus in the shape of a deer and walked and talked with him for two or three miles. (John A. Clark letter, August 31, 1840 in "Early Mormon Documents", 2: 271.) The local Presbyterian minister called him "a visionary fanatic." (Ronald W. Walker, "Martin Harris: Mormonism's Early Convert," "Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought" 19 (Winter 1986):34-35.) A friend, who praised Harris as "universally esteemed as an honest man," also declared that Harris's mind "was overbalanced by 'marvellousness'" and that his belief in earthly visitations of angels and ghosts gave him the local reputation of being crazy.(Pomroy Tucker Reminiscence, 1858 in "Early Mormon Documents" 3: 71.) Another friend said, "Martin was a man that would do just as he agreed with you. But, he was a great man for seeing spooks." (Lorenzo Saunders Interview, November 12, 1884, "Early Mormon Documents" 2: 149); Harvnb|Turner|1851|p=215.] farmer from nearby Palmyra, became an early believer and gave Smith $50 to finance the translation of the plates. [ Harvnb|Tiffany|1859|pp=168–169; Harvnb|Howe|1834|p=260; Harvnb|Smith|1853|p=113; Harvnb|Roberts|1902|p=19.] Harris's wife Lucy 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." [ Harvnb|Smith|1853|110-112.]

Smith moved with his wife to her hometown of Harmony, Pennsylvania in late October 1827, where he began transcribing the writing on the plates. [Harvnb|Tiffany|1859|p=170.] When Martin Harris left Palmyra to visit Smith without taking his wife along, she became suspicious that Smith intended to defraud her and her husband. [Harvnb|Smith|1853|p=114.]

On Harris's return, 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. [Harvnb|Smith|1853|p=114;Harvnb|Smith|1853|p=115] Lucy then accompanied her husband back to Harmony in April 1828, when Martin agreed to serve as Smith's scribe. [Harvnb|Smith|1853|p=115.] Before returning home after two weeks, Lucy searched the Smith house and grounds for the plates, but because Smith said he did not need their physical presence to create the transcription [Harvnb|Stevenson|1882; Harvnb|Jessee|1976|p=4.] —they were reportedly hidden in a nearby woods—she was unable to locate them. [Harvnb|Smith|1853|pp=115–116; Harvnb|Howe|1834|pp=264–65.]

Harris as Smith's scribe

From April to June 1828, Martin Harris acted as Joseph Smith's scribe as Smith dictated the manuscript using the Urim and Thummim and seer stones. [During this early period of translation, Harris said that Smith used a seer stone Smith had located in a well years earlier, or to a lesser extent, a pair of "spectacles" made of two seer stones that Smith called the "Urim and Thummim", although Smith preferred the former out of convenience Harv|Stevenson|1882|p=86. "See Golden Plates." ] By the middle of June, Smith had dictated about 116 manuscript pages of text. [Smith later called this book the "Book of Lehi", and he was the first to say that the number of missing pages was 116. Harv|Roberts|1902|p=20;Harv|Smith|1835|loc=sec. 36, v. 41.]

Harris continued to have doubts about the authenticity of the manuscript, [Richard L. Bushman, "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling" (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 66: "Yet uncertainty still beset Harris."] and he "could not forget his wife's skepticism or the hostile queries of Palmyra's tavern crowd." Smith's mother, Lucy, "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?" [Bushman, 66.] 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. [Bushman, 66; Harv|Smith|1853|p=117;Harv|Roberts|1902|p=20; Harv|Smith|1853|pp=117–118.]

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." [Bushman, 67.] On one occasion Harris picked the lock of the bureau and damaged it, irritating his wife. [Bushman, 67. Lucy Harris was described by Lucy Mack Smith as a woman of "irascible temper," but Harris may also have abused her. Lucy Harris also suggested that her husband may have committed adultery with a neighboring "Mrs. Haggart." Harv|Lucy Mack Smith|1853|1:367 "Lucy Harris statement," in "EMD", 2: 34-36: "In one of his fits of rage he struck me with the butt end of a whip, which I think had been used for driving oxen, and was about the size of my thumb, and three or four feet long. He beat me on the head four or five times, and the next day turned me out of doors twice, and beat me in a shameful manner....Whether the Mormon religion be true or false, I leave the world to judge, for its effects upon Martin Harris have been to make him more cross, turbulent and abusive to me." In March 1830, a revelation from Smith warned Harris not to "covet thy neighbor's wife." "D&C" 19: 25.] The manuscript then disappeared. [According to Pomeroy Tucker (1802-1870), who was an acquaintance of the Harris family, Lucy Harris took the manuscript while Harris was asleep and burned it, keeping that fact a secret until after publication of the "Book of Mormon". "A feud was thus produced between husband and wife, which was never reconciled." Harv|Tucker|1867|pp=46; also at "EMD", 3: 11. A neighbor in Harmony said that prior to burning it, Lucy Harris hid the manuscript and told Smith to find it with his seer stone, but that Smith was unsuccessful Harv|Mather|1880|p=202. For other theories of what happened to the missing pages see Dan Vogel, "Early Mormon Documents" (Salt Lake City: Signature, 2000), 3: 480-81. Master forger Mark Hofmann may have been working on a forgery of the 116 pages before he was convicted of murder. See Allen D. Roberts, "'The Truth Is the Most Important Thing': The New Mormon History According to Mark Hofmann," "Dialogue" 20 (1987), 89-90.]

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. [Sophia Lewis, 1834, quoted in "EMD" 4: 298. Lewis, who was present at the birth, said that the baby was stillborn.] Emma Smith 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. [Bushman, 66-67; Harv|Smith|1853|p=118; Harv|Howe|1834|p=269.]

The following day Harris dragged into the Smith family home in distress and without the pages. Smith urged Harris to re-search his house, 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". [Bushman, 67; Harv|Smith|1853|p=121]

After returning to Harmony without Harris, Smith dictated to Emma his first written revelation, [The revelation is today "Doctrine and Covenants", Section 3.] which both rebuked him and denounced Harris as "a wicked man." [Harv|Phelps|1833|loc=sec. 2:5.] However, the revelation assured Smith that if he was penitent, the interpreters would be returned to him on his fourth annual visit with Moroni on September 22 1828 and he would regain his ability to translate. [Bushman, 68; Harv|Phelps|1833|2:7; [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/3/10-11 D&C 3:10-11] ]

Resumed translation 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." [Bushman, 70-71.] During this period Smith attended a Methodist class in Harmony but then withdrew when a cousin of Emma's objected to a potential member who was a "practicing necromancer." [Bushman, 69; Joseph and Hiel Lewis, “Mormon History: A New Chapter about to Be Published,” "Amboy [Illinois] Journal" 24 (30 April 1879), 1, in "EMD", 4: 305-6: "He presented himself in a very serious and humble manner, and the minister, not suspecting evil, put his name on the class book, in the absence of some of the official members, among whom was the undersigned, Joseph Lewis, who when he learned what was done, took with him Joshua McKune, and had a talk with Smith. They told him plainly that such a character as he was a disgrace to the church, that he could not be a member of the church unless he broke off his sins by repentance, made public confession, renounced his fraudulent and hypocritical practices, and gave some evidence that he intended to reform and conduct himself somewhat nearer like a christian than he had done."]

In April 1829, Smith was joined by Oliver Cowdery, a fellow Vermonter and a distant relation who had previously used a rod to receive revelations. ["Early Mormon Documents", 1: 599-600, 604, n. 11. Cowdery's use of a rod is confirmed in a revelation to Smith in April 1829: "Now this is not all, for you have another gift, which is the gift of working with the rod: behold it has told you things: behold there is no other power save God, that can cause this rod of nature, to work in you hands, for it is the work of God...." "Book of Commandments" VII: 3.] Cowdery replaced Harris as scribe, and the pace of the transcription of the Golden Plates increased dramatically, so that within two months nearly the entire remainder of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon was completed. [Bushman, 73.]

Smith 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. [See [http://scriptures.lds.org/en/dc/10 D&C| D&C 10: 17-18, 31] for Smith's description of the plans to alter the manuscript.] When he got to the end of the book, Smith 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." [Bushman, 74. The tranlated version of these "small plates" includes the books of 1 & 2 Nephi, Jacob, Enos, Jarom and Omni. The unabridged version, not retranslated, Smith called "The Book of Lehi."] Smith transcribed these records, and they appeared 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, who claimed to have seen and handled the Golden Plates.

The loss of the manuscript provided critics of Mormonism with additional opportunities to dismiss the religion as a fraud. [ [http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/bom_early_problems/goldenbible_stolenmanuscript.htm M. T. Lamb, "The Golden Bible" (1887)] , an early critical view of the lost manuscript problem. Lamb noted that the plates from which the 116 pages were translated had been preserved for 1400 years by the special providence of God, but that a "wrathful woman" had undone His plans; neither God nor the angel stopped Smith from translating the wrong plates until Harris lost the manuscript; God scolded Smith for his lost of the manuscript, even though its lost was "the best thing that could have happened for the cause of truth." Although Smith said that "evil men" would produce an altered manuscript if he were to translate the same part of the Golden Plates again, no such attempt has been uncovered. Nor did Smith ever announce what had become of the lost pages despite his followers' belief in his prophetic gift.] 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.'" [Fawn Brodie, "No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith the Mormon Prophet" 2nd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 54.]

Martin Harris, despite earlier being condemned by heavenly revelation as "a wicked man," was allowed to become one of the Three Witnesses. He mortgaged his farm for $3000 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. [Bushman, 80. Lucy Harris swore (and had corroboration) that her husband intended to make money through his relationship to Smith and the Book of Mormon. "EMD" 2: 35.]

Further reading

*Encyclopedia of Mormonism entry on the [http://www.lightplanet.com/mormons/book_of_mormon/116_pages.html 116 pages]
*A chapter from [http://www.utlm.org/onlineresources/bom_early_problems/goldenbible_stolenmanuscript.htm M. T. Lamb, "The Golden Bible" (1887)] , an early skeptical view of the lost manuscript problem.
*A modern skeptical analysis of the [http://www.utlm.org/newsletters/no72.htm problem of the lost pages] .

Notes

References

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