How did Joseph Smith write the Book of Mormon?

Added: 2026-05-25

[00:00:00]Well, do you mind if we back up to you the topic of the Book of Mormon because when I was doing the research in 2007 on the topic of plural marriage and Joseph Smith with Don, people would ask me, are you worried you're going to find out something about Joseph that's going to change your beliefs?

[00:00:18]And I never was worried and it may have been naive naivete at that time, but I reasoned in my mind that in 1829, there's no way Joseph could have created the Book of Mormon from his own intellect. He must have been a prophet then and so I didn't think I was going to find anything in Joseph's life after 1829 to make me change my beliefs and I didn't.

[00:00:40]And like Don Bradley, what when you get into those primary documents, it's easy to see, I think, why people believed in him as a prophet. And and he wasn't perfect though and he never claimed to be perfect, uh but his sins were like everyday sins like the rest of us. He had a temper, he he manifested ego probably on occasion, but but he was trying. He was trying to overcome those things. He He wasn't the scoundrel as we that we've referred to, I think. That's my opinion.

[00:01:08]But and I what I I did in 2015, when I was more or less done researching polygamy and I keep getting opportunities to revisit it, which is fine, but I I thought, let's test this theory.

[00:01:20]Could Joseph Smith have created the Book of Mormon using his own intellectual gifts? That's the most popular theory today. I wrote an article was published in BYU Studies in 2019 where I looked at all of the theories >> [snorts] >> from the secularists, the atheists, the empiricists and the naturalists. And what are how did they explain this 269,000 word three-month uh dictation from Joseph? And the most popular theory today is, yeah, Joseph was smart enough he could do it. You know, he had the skills of a revivalist preacher, some say. He didn't, by the way, but they say he did and that he used those and was able to do it.

[00:01:58]Well, I I further tested it and I'll try to go quickly here cuz we're here to talk about polygamy, but in context, if we're going to say Joseph was a fraud or that that he was a false prophet, um let's recognize it for 3 months in 1829, he behaved just like a true prophet would behave because he created a 269,320 word book. It has 207 characters. It has 147 geographical locations with hundreds of movements between and it has 77 storylines with 170 new English proper nouns, over 100 different titles for God. It has over 100,000 words in 68 religious discourses discussing over 70 highly nuanced Christian topics and themes.

[00:02:46]This is a highly complex complex book and then you know that most remarkable thing about it is that there has not been a single full sentence edited since Joseph dictated all of the words.