Lost 116 Pages - Resumed Transcription and The Witnesses

Resumed Transcription 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." 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."

In April 1829, Smith was joined by Oliver Cowdery, a fellow Vermonter and a distant relation who replaced Harris as scribe. The pace of the transcription increased dramatically so that within two months nearly the entire remainder of the manuscript of the Book of Mormon 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. (Nevertheless, "evil men" might also have altered the lost manuscript to contradict the new account as well, as is evidenced by Mark Hofmann's supposed desire to do so.) When Smith reached the end of the book, 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, who claimed to have seen and handled the Golden Plates.

The loss of the manuscript provided opponents of Mormonism, such as the nineteenth-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.'" After computer-assisted analysis in 1989, the Tanners argued that the lost manuscript does not support the hypothesis that Joseph Smith was a misguided individual that believed the mental invention of his own creative imagination, but rather that Joseph Smith was at the very least minimally aware of deception on his part.

Martin Harris 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.