When I first set out to learn what I could of the Book of Mormon‘s lost pages, I had no idea how deeply the complexity of the text would require me to keep going, or for how long—thus far for a decade and a half—and how completely that search would turn my life and view of the world upside down.
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When I began this research on the lost pages I was losing my connection with the Restoration and was on my way out of the Church. Out of a desire for truth and a fascination with the subject, I continued my research while I was away from the Church, and what I found in that research led, ultimately, to a reappraisal of my direction.
In conjunction with the things I learned in studying Joseph Smith’s First Vision, what I learned about the Book of Mormon by studying its lost pages opened the door to a new direction, another spiritual journey, one back to faith and to the Church. My research into the Book of Mormon’s lost pages became the first step in my personal restoration to the Restoration.
My research held many other surprises too. Some of them intertwined with my return to faith; all of them were transformative in how I have come to see the Restoration. Seven of these larger conclusions from my study of the lost pages merit fleshing out here.
1. A Jewish Book
One of the most striking and startling things about both the coming forth and the content of the Book of Mormon’s lost text is how Hebraic, and even specifically Jewish, they were.
In the buildup to the lost manuscript’s translation, the watershed events in its coming forth were keyed to Jewish festival days (Chapters 1–3). The narrative history within the book itself appears to have begun with one of those feats (Chapter 7). It also began at the opening of the great shaping condition of Jewish life across millennia: the Diaspora, the dispersion of Jews—whose very name means people of Judea—across a wider world.
Although it appears to have largely escaped note, the Book of Mormon tells us that it began in the literal very first days of the Diaspora (Chapters 6–7).
The lives of Lehi and Nephi were consequently devoted to solving, in part, the problem of Diaspora or Exile: if they could not remain perpetually in Judea could they create their own Judea and restore the wholeness of the original Jewish commonwealth that had existed there? The problem Lehi and Nephi sought to solve was thus a distinctly Jewish problem.
There is an academic idea that during the Book of Mormon’s coming forth the Restoration was very Christian primitivist—focused selectively on the New Testament and restoring the primitive church like many movements around Joseph Smith at the time (such as the Stone-Campbell movement from which Sidney Rigdon emerged).
For Joseph they were not a mystery but a memory.
When we look at the the earliest part of the Book of Mormon—the first half of Mormon’s abridgment that was lost—we do indeed find a restorationist program being enacted by Lehi and Nephi; but rather than trying to build the New Testament church, they were trying to rebuild the “Old Testament” Israel!
The contents of the lost pages thus entirely buck scholarly expectation that the Book of Mormon will behave as a New Testament-focused, nineteenth-century Christian primitivist text.
2. The Centrality of Temple Worship
Another of the more surprising things emerging from this research is how central temple worship was within the lost pages. As notes in Chapter 11, all the major early events of Lehi and Nephi’s exodus culminate in one major event after Nephi’s conquest: the re-establishment of the worship of Israel’s God in the temple of Nephi.
Lehi’s prophesying, Nephi’s conflict with Laban, Lehi’s finding of the Liahona, the use of the Liahona during their wandering in the wilderness, Nephi taking David-like leadership of his older brothers—these all eventuate, as if by grand design, in Nephi being able to establish a temple like Solomon’s that is led with royal priesthood authority and stocked with relics paralleling those of the Tabernacle and Jerusalem temple. In the lives of Lehi and Nephi, everything builds toward the temple.
Given that the Book of Mormon was so Judaic, it is not surprising that Jewish temple worship would be prominent in its pages. And that is indeed not the truly striking thing. What is striking is that through the lens of the lost pages we see that not only was temple worship characteristic of biblical Jews prominent in the Book of Mormon’s lost pages, so was temple worship as recognizable to Latter-day Saints.
As we saw in the story of Aminadi (Chapter 13), temple worship among the Nephites was not only about sacrifice; it was also about the revelation of symbolic truths with lower and higher levels of meaning. As we saw in the story of Mosiah1 (Chapter 14) and in the parallel account of the brother of Jared on Mount Shelem, temple worship in the Book of Mormon was about the testing of our faith and knowledge so we might be redeemed from the Fall and admitted into the presence of God.
Then, as now, the temple was a place to seek God’s presence and learn his truths.
3. The Mormon Book
An idea exists for many—an idea I once held—that the most distinctive doctrines of the Restoration are not in the Book of Mormon. This is sometimes expressed by critics of the Restoration in quips that “there is not much Mormonism in the Book of Mormon.” Delving deeply into the Book of Mormon’s clues about what was in its lost pages straightforwardly refutes this.
The Book of Mormon’s lost text was the earliest contemporaneously recorded revelation of the Restoration. Before the Book of Abraham, before the Joseph Smith Translation, before the revelations of the Doctrine and Covenants, and before the Book of Mormon text we still have, the Book of Mormon’s now-lost text was revealed to Joseph Smith.
And when we look at this earliest recorded revelation of the Restoration, what do we find?
Already we find that the faith propounded there was not just a New Testament faith; it was a whole-Bible faith. Already we find that it was focused on the temple as not just a place of sacrifice; it was a place to meet God, to encounter truths communicated in symbolic form, and to receive revelations of higher and higher levels of truth.
Already we find that it was not just a sacred history of the past; it was about progressing to receive divine attributes like the wisdom embodied in the interpreters—an “all-seeing eye,” the ability to see as God sees and thus grow in the realization of our own divine potential.
If you want to know what was in the lost pages, look at the Restoration.
The Restoration of the Gospel of Jesus Christ in its full bloom—what has been called “Nauvoo Mormonism”—is original and literal “Mormonism”; it is the very faith propounded by Mormon in his book, beginning in its lost pages with the first words of written revelation given to Joseph Smith.
This is not only evident in what we can know of the lost text. Rather, in light of such findings about Mormon’s lost abridgment, we can better understand what it is in Mormon’s available abridgment—neither of which was meant to stand alone; each was part of a larger whole.
The Prophet Joseph Smith once said, “I have a key by which I understand the scripture—I enquire what was the question which drew out the answer.”
Context provides vital information for understanding any passage of scripture, and, as with most books, the context of Mormon’s abridgment was largely provided in the opening act that was lost.
Glimpses into Mormon’s lost abridgment may provide keys to unlocking some of the meanings Mormon intended to convey. The same is true of the book as a whole; understanding Mormon’s abridgment—both the lost and published text—opens our understanding of the small plates and Moroni’s writings.
Thus, for example, grasping the temple context of the Nephite recovery of the interpreters opened my eyes to the temple context in the brother of Jared’s recovery of the interpreters in Ether 3.
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4. The Lost Pages and the Restoration
While it may be surprising to us to learn that “Nauvoo” elements of the Restoration were already present in the Book of Mormon’s lost pages, this would have been no surprise to Joseph Smith. With virtual certainty, we can see the seeds of later aspects of the Restoration arising in the lost pages and planted in Joseph. Thus, while the Book of Mormon’s lost pages may be a mystery that we are just beginning to crack, for Joseph they were not a mystery but a memory.
We know that until late into his relatively young life, Joseph recalled and reported to a number of Saints Ishmael’s lineage from the tribe of Ephraim (Chapter 9). If the Prophet remembered this genealogical detail, he surely recalled larger and more consequential teachings and events of the lost manuscript.
He would have found a template for the restoration of Israel.
As a book about restoration, the Book of Mormon facilitated the Prophet’s work of Restoration. In its pages, particularly as it appeared in its now-lost manuscript, he would have found a template for restoration—specifically, the restoration of Israel.
Here he would have first encountered in scripture the idea of a restoration of the temple. he would have learned just what worship in such a temple was to look like. He would have encountered the idea of actually building a New Jerusalem, as Nephi built his new Jerusalem.
The first half of Mormon’s abridgment is an ever-present absence. In an important and powerful sense, the lost book of Mormon we are attempting to recover in these pages was never really gone. If you want to know what was in the lost pages, look at the Restoration effected by the Prophet Joseph Smith. He knew the Book of Mormon’s lost contents and taught and enacted them in his continuing work of Restoration after translating the Book of Mormon.
5. The Book of Mormon and the Bible
Delving into the clues about what was in the Book of Mormon’s lost pages brings into sharp relief the Book of Mormon’s remarkable relationship with the Bible—how it begins in, extends, and integrates the Bible.
The Book of Mormon begins within the Bible—the larger narratives of Israel and the kingdom of Judah, and the specific narratives of Zedekiah and Jeremiah. This is made clear by attention to the lost pages’ details about the post-Babylonian invasion, Passover setting of Lehi’s vision, and its account of Zedekiah and his son Muloch.
The Book of Mormon then extends that story. If the Bible is the story of Israel, set in a small region of the Middle East, then by carrying Israel’s story to the other side of the world, the Book of Mormon stretches the Bible and implicitly extends it to engulf the entire globe.
It does this by not only carrying it geographically further but also by recapitulating all of the Bible’s major events and re-building Israel on successively finer and finer levels.
The events and figures of the Nephite world typologically mirror the events and figures of the biblical Israelite world. In demonstrating this more fully, the discernible contents of the lost pages make clearer a message that is intended to be revealed in the Book of Mormon: that just as there was and is a Judean Israel in the Old World, there was and is an American Israel in the New World, one with a similar pattern and purpose—and destiny.
In responding to its latter-day critics, the Book of Mormon itself implicitly notes how it extends the Bible (2 Ne. 29:3–14). In refuting as “fools” those who say, “A Bible! A Bible! We have got a Bible, and there cannot be any more Bible” (vv. 3) and “A Bible, we have got a Bible, and we need no more Bible” (vv. 6), the Book of Mormon embraces the idea that there is, in one sense, “more Bible” in its own pages.
The Book of Mormon also integrates the Bible with incredible depth. Only after closely studying the narratives of Nephi and Laban in the small plates account and in the clues left for us about the lost account, have I perceived much of the richness in the biblical narratives of David and Goliath and of David and Saul. Only after closely engaging the lost and extant narratives of the brass plates, the sword of Laban, and Nephi’s conquest (Chapter 10) have I found myself understanding at any depth the biblical narrative of Joseph and his connection with the Exodus and Conquest.
The Book of Mormon not only reads the Bible; it further writes the Bible.
Close attention to the Book of Mormon narratives yields novel insight into the narratives of the Bible. The Book of Mormon’s extensions of the biblical narratives make those narratives make more sense, both by disclosing depths of meaning that are already there and by developing those narratives further in recounting additional events along the trajectory on which the biblical account was going.
In its tendency to take biblical themes and extend them further, and to bring the Bible’s narratives to more complete development and integration into one great divine whole, the Book of Mormon seems at times more biblical than the Bible, or rather, the Book of Mormon not only reads the Bible; it further writes the Bible, carrying its grand meta-narrative of Israel beyond the covers of the Old and New Testaments, across the hemispheres, and beyond the First Century, bringing the grand epic of Israel to us, and offering us a part in the great consummation of that narrative by its Author.
6. A Fractal Israel
Israel, as presented in the Book of Mormon, bears a pattern we can best describe using the mathematical and scientific concept of a fractal. A fractal is a pattern that repeats smaller and smaller copies of itself. At each successively smaller level, the structure remains the same.
An example of a fractal structure in nature would be a tree. The pattern on which a tree trunk shoots forth boughs, which shoot forth branches, which shoot forth smaller branches, and so on, iterates over and over down to the finest level of the branching veins within each leaf.
The Book of Mormon nation of Israel, which fittingly describes itself as “a righteous branch unto the house of Israel” (2 Nephi 3:5), bears just such a structure.
Lehites re-created Israel in miniature.
In the Book of Mormon, the process of apostasy and restoration by which a functionally independent Israelite nation is created and is recursive and iterates over and over again. Thus, as seen in the Book of Mormon’s published text, under Lehi and Nephi’s direction the Lehites recapitulated the larger history of Israel and thereby re-created Israel in miniature.
They established a covenant, divided into tribes, made the exodus on which they gathered sacred relics for their temple, made a conquest of a new promised land, established a sacred dynasty, built a temple and a temple city—a new Jerusalem, and constructed a system of priesthood and temple worship remarkably parallel to that of the First Temple Jerusalem.
The Lehites, thus described, constitute a part of biblical Israel, yet a part that contains all the features of and shares the structure of the whole. The Lehites, while just a part of Israel, are functionally a whole Israel and thus a new Israel.
They might thus best be described as a sub-Israel, and the Book of Mormon’s own analogy to a branch, which shares the structure of its mother tree, seems particularly apropos.
This fractal-like repetition continues within the Book of Mormon as well. After those of this first Nephite nation fell into apostasy and broke their covenant, Mosiah1 led them in the making of a new covenant, took them on a new exodus on which they found yet another relic for their temple, carried out a non-violent conquest and a new enumeration of tribes with the Mulochites (the seven Lehite tribes plus the Mulochites), established a new sacred dynasty, made the city of Zarahemla a new new Jerusalem, and established the worship of Israel’s God at the temple of Mosiah, thereby recapitulating again the founding events of Israel recorded in the Bible, and re-creating Israel once more!
Even the later colonizing expeditions to the land of Nephi attempted to iterate this process once more, carrying out an exodus and attempted conquest, establishing a new dynasty, rebuilding Nephi’s sacred city and temple. However, this effort at recapitulation and re-creation was incomplete, and, thus perhaps not surprisingly, it failed.
At each successful new level, the process of recapitulating Israel’s history leads to the creation of the previous Israel in microcosm, a smaller new Israel, or sub-Israel, an Israel within an Israel within an Israel. . . . Yet none of these sub-Israels can claim to be the true Israel over and against the rest of the house of Israel. Each is part of the biblical Israel, established through God’s covenants with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.
To use an analogy from Joseph Smith, a branch cannot jump off from an apple tree and say, “I am the true tree.”
It is possible that this iterative process of the creation of new, finer branches of Israel is not only a duplicative process but a progressive process. Israel’s Conquest was offensively violent. Nephi’s conquest was defensively violent. Mosiah1‘s conquest was non-violent. Perhaps the same processes that create Israels or sub-Israels also tend to refine them.
7. A Messianic Manuscript
As we saw with the opening of the “Book of Benjamin,” the lost manuscript ended on a note of Messianic expectation (Chapter 15). Hope for the coming Messiah ran so high that Nephites thought they saw him in false Christs and even in messianic forerunners like Benjamin himself.
The lost Book of Mormon manuscript thus ends where it began. Its narrative opened with Passover and the expectation of the Lamb of God—the Messiah and the redemption of the world (Chapter 7). Its narrative closes on the same note: messianic expectation, hope in Christ.
This theme of hope in Israel’s Messiah bookends the lost manuscript at each side. He was the lost manuscript’s Alpha and Omega, its beginning and its end. The entire lost text of the Book of Mormon thus comprises an inclusio—a text that begins and ends on the same motif, a structure common to the Hebrew Bible and one that marks the text off as a discrete unit with a unified theme.
The lost Book of Mormon manuscript was merely the part of Mormon’s book that Joseph Smith happened to finish dictating before Martin Harris borrowed the incomplete manuscript.
It was not intended by either Mormon or by Joseph Smith to comprise a complete literary unit, a work of scripture with a coherent and self-contained theological message.
But a larger hand intervened. Despite its human author’s failure to intend or plan as much, the lost manuscript did present a unified theological message, beginning and concluding on the same messianic note, a symmetry that gave it a kind of completeness and drove home its central message.
If this wholeness cannot be attributed to the book’s human author, who did not know where the lost manuscript would end, or even that there would be a manuscript loss, then the manuscript’s elegant beginning and ending on the same note of messianic hope may be seen as a contribution to the work by the hoped-for one himself, an inclusio written by the finger of the one the Book of Mormon names “the author and finisher of our faith” (Heb. 12:12).
Book excerpt. From The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories by Don Bradley. Copyright © 2019 by Don Bradley. Published by Greg Kofford Books. Used by permission of the publisher. Minor style and grammar changes have been made for an improved online reading experience.
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About the Scholar
Don Bradley is an independent historian of religion with an M.A. in History from Utah State University and experience working with the Joseph Smith Papers. He is best known for his groundbreaking research on the lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon and their role in the Restoration. Bradley authored The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories after more than a decade of careful historical and scriptural study. His work has been praised for combining scholarly rigor with spiritual insight, making him a trusted voice on the subject. Through his research, Bradley offers readers fresh ways to see the lost 116 pages as central to the Restoration’s story.
Further Reading
- Did Lucy Harris Steal the Lost Manuscript?
- Did the Kinderhook Plates Really Fool Joseph Smith?
- Let’s Talk About the Translation of the Book of Mormon
- What Is the ‘Six Days in August’ Movie?
- What Does Mosiah Contribute to Book of Mormon Theology?
The Lost 116 Pages
- The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Greg Kofford Books)
- Lost Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (Church History Topics)
- The Lost 116 Pages Story: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Might Know (BYU Religious Studies Center)
- 9 Things We Now Know About the Lost 116 Pages of the Book of Mormon Manuscript (LDS Living)
- What Really Happened to the Lost 116 Pages? An Interview with Don Bradley (Sunstone Podcast)