The phrase “me to pass that” is the top line of one small fragment that’s part of the original Book of Mormon manuscript. “Jesus Christ w” is on the second line. The opposite side has “lem loose th” and “ion for thus saith” and “deemed without m.”
This fragment is from 3 Nephi 9 in the original manuscript (and the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon) and in 3 Nephi 20 and 21 in the 2013 edition of the scriptures.
The fragment is published in “The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Vol. 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon,” which was released Tuesday, Jan. 25, by the Church Historian’s Press. The volume includes images of the roughly 28% of the 500-page manuscript created during the translation of the Book of Mormon that still exists today.
“People have been interested in this manuscript since its creation,” said Robin Scott Jensen, the co-editor of “The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Vol. 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon.”
The volume is a facsimile edition and has images with the manuscript leaves or fragments and on the facing page includes the transcription, what is likely missing based on the printer’s manuscript and the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon, along with notes on who the scribe likely was.
“This is the artifact that was produced from Joseph Smith dictating from the Book of Mormon. It’s this wonderful window into this event that is believed by millions of people is miraculous,” Jensen said of the translation process.
Original text from other scriptures, such as the Old Testament and New Testament, no longer exist.
“This original manuscript is so unique in world scriptures because this is as close as we’re going to get to that miraculous event,” Jesnen said. “I can’t say enough about how important this original manuscript is from a textual perspective and a historical perspective.”
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The manuscript
The original Book of Mormon manuscript includes the handwriting of several scribes, including Oliver Cowdery, John Whitmer and Christian Whitmer, Jensen said.
“I like to call that the dictated copy because that’s the one that was on the table being written on by scribes as Joseph Smith read the words aloud from the Book of Mormon,” Jensen said.
Joseph Smith “had learned the lesson early on that you don’t want a single copy of the Book of Mormon,” Jensen said. Early in the translation, Martin Harris took the first 116 pages of the translation to show family members, but later couldn’t find them.
Joseph asked Oliver Cowdery to make a second copy of the manuscript, which would become the printer’s manuscript that was taken to the E.B. Grandin print shop for the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. It was published in “Revelations and Translations, Vol. 3: Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon,” which was released in 2015 in two parts.
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Joseph and other leaders kept the original or dictated manuscript of the Book of Mormon through the 1830s. Editions of the Book of Mormon were printed in 1830, 1837 and 1840 (and in 1841 in England) and digital scans of those editions are available on the Joseph Smith Papers website.
When the Church was in Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith received a revelation in 1841 to build the Nauvoo Temple and also a boarding house that was called the Nauvoo House (see Doctrine and Covenants 124).
When construction on the Nauvoo House began, they laid a cornerstone and also had a ceremony, Jensen said.
In the cornerstone, there was a cavity between the two of the rocks that was used as a time capsule that included some coins, a newspaper and Bible, Jensen said.
Then Joseph Smith asked everyone to wait as he wanted to put one more thing in.
“So he walked across the street, went into his house and came back with the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, and they placed it in the cornerstone,” he said.
About 40 years after the cornerstone ceremony, Emma Smith’s second husband, Lewis Bidamon, was remodeling the Nauvoo House and opened the cornerstone. Bidamon “knew that it was important and so he had it there in his house,” Jensen said.
They did try to seal the time capsule with molten lead, but water had seeped in.
“I really do think that they were trying to preserve it, but the elements got in,” Jensen said.
Of the stacked pages, the ones on the bottom had the most damage. “Portions of 1 Nephi are pretty well preserved … There are some pages where the entirety of the text is on the page,” he said.
However, the further back in the manuscript, there’s more damage to the pages.
“You have portions of Ether where all you have is just a tiny fragment of the manuscript, and that’s all that survived,” he said. “There are portions of the Book of Mormon that are entirely gone.”
The dictated manuscript of seven of the 15 books of the Book of Mormon are no longer extant — Jarom, Omni, the Words of Mormon, Mosiah, 4 Nephi, Mormon and Moroni.
As visitors would come from Utah and elsewhere to Nauvoo, Illinois, Bidamon would give them out. Many of these would be given back to the Church.
Franklin D. Richards, who was the Church historian, went to Nauvoo and was able to obtain “quite a number of pages.” Later, his son donated them to the Church.
In addition to the Church, portions of the manuscript are at the Wilford Woodruff Museum, University of Utah and in private collections.
“So between the loss of the manuscript in the cornerstone, and kind of this scattering of the manuscript, we only have 28% of the text that has survived, and so there’s probably an estimated 500 pages that went into the cornerstone. And of those 500 pages, about 230 pages have portions of it that have survived,” Jensen said. Those portions vary from full pages to small fragments.
“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle where you look at the shape, you look at the context, you read the words you say, ‘OK, where could this fit?’” he said. The scribes wrote on the front and back of the pages, so turning over the fragment and seeing what’s there also helps give clues to narrow it down a little bit more.
“It’s a very time consuming process,” he said. “It’s been a decades-long effort to try to place those fragments.”
Photographing the manuscript
Several sets of images have been taken of the manuscript, including some dating to the turn of the 20th century. In the 1950s, Ernst Koehler of the Genealogical Society of Utah took photos of every page in ultraviolet light. Other images were taken in 1968 and some in the 1990s, arranged by Royal Skousen for the Book of Mormon Critical Text project. Also, during that time, there were various conservation efforts to help stabilize the manuscript.
In 2017, multispectral images were taken of the leaves, in which different wavelengths of light were used to capture images and then combined to create a full-color image.
“Multispectral imaging has really helped in a lot of pages to bring out that ink to make it more legible, but it hasn’t worked in all of them,” Jensen said.
The editors reviewed all of the available images and decided which one would be the best one to present.
“We’ve tried to select the best image based upon each leaf. There is an appendix to the volume that shows the alternative image of each one,” Jensen said. “So this volume, when all was said and done, gives individual readers greater access to this manuscript than if they would consult the original manuscript.”
Skousen, an emeritus professor of linguistics and English language at Brigham Young University, who started the Book of Mormon Critical Text project in the late 1980s in looking at the Book of Mormon manuscripts and spent his career studying the original and printers transcripts, served as co-editor of the volume. His transcriptions were the basis of the ones used in this Joseph Smith Papers volume.
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There were many people on the Joseph Smith Papers staff and in the larger Church History Department with a variety of skills to help create this volume.
“It really was this collaborative effort of bringing together skills and passions and this ability to make this volume happen,” Jensen said.
Next volumes
“The Joseph Smith Papers, Revelations and Translations, Vol. 5: Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon” was originally scheduled to be released in November 2021, but was delayed due to supply chain issues. This volume completes the five planned volumes for the Revelations and Translations series.
The project includes 26 planned print volumes that are divided into five series: Documents, Journals, Revelations and Translations, Histories, and Administrative Records. Two additional series — Legal Records and the Financial Records — are online at www.josephsmithpapers.org.
Once a volume is published, it’s available on the Joseph Smith Papers website at www.josephsmithpapers.org about 18 months later, Jensen said.
There are three more volumes planned for the Documents series — two more scheduled to be released later this year and the final volume in 2023.
Correction: One of the places that has portions of the Book of Mormon manuscript is the Wilford Wood Museum, not the Wilford Woodruff Museum.
