Book Excerpt: ‘How The Book Of Mormon Came to Pass’ By Lars Nielsen (2024)

Several explanations for the seemingly sudden appearance of “The Book of Mormon” in 1829 (first published in 1830) have been put forth by both historians and apologists alike. Each holds some value to its advocates while displaying obvious inconsistencies and unexplained features. However, significant new evidence necessitates the revision of all such authorship theories, including and especially the sole-authorship hypothesis — that Joseph Smith, Jr. (between the ages of 22 and 23) single-handedly composed all the sentences in “The Book of Mormon” through creative writing, automatic writing or inspired dictation.

Neoteric observations reveal deliberately hidden details in Mormonism’s keystone scripture that could not have been put there by Smith. What is the real story behind how the two bookending characters (Nephi and Mormon) got their names? Where did the idea of Nephi being guided through the wilderness by a spiritually magnetic compass — a curious ball having pointers, spindles and writing on its sides — truly come from?

In this book, such details are called “Kircherisms,” a new class of anachronisms in The Book of Mormon. These Kircherisms have revealed a fresh set of influences, an undiscovered source text, and a wellspring of intriguing evidence that has never been published anywhere else. With an infusion of new data, this book presents a novel and distinctive exegesis as well as a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive framework for organizing and evaluating the merits of all prior authorship theories. One mechanism, in particular, has emerged as the most comprehensive, evidence-based, and satisfying explanation for how “The Book of Mormon” came to pass.

The following excerpt is from Chapter 2, “Prolegomenon.” If you would like to read much of Chapter 1 for free, which explains who Athanasius Kircher was, click here.

Anachronisms are people, objects, and ideas from one time period that appear nonsensically in writings attributed to a different time period; they are chronological inconsistencies that, at the very least, reveal that a work must have been written after a specific date. An account of George Washington cutting down a cherry tree with a chainsaw, for example, could not have been written until sometime after the invention of the chainsaw. To the anachronisms that appear in The Book of Mormon, I apply the term “Kircherism” following the matchless lead of the Mexican nun, Sor Juana Inéz de la Cruz (Figure 23), who entertained the intellectual elite of New Spain with her poetry, musical compositions, and more than seventy Baroque romances. She kept many of Kircher’s works in her personal library during her lifetime (1648–1695). In her fiftieth romance, she introduced a new verb into the Spanish language: “Kirkerizar” [Kircherize], which essentially means “to playfully blend science with other influences”— a locution that I will also employ. Incidentally, her influence was so great, according to Octavio Paz, who won the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature, that no female poet in the Americas would rival her until Emily Dickinson. She was often called “La Décima Musa” [The Tenth Muse] and “La Fénix de México” [The Phoenix of Mexico] to parallel Kircher, who, as we have seen, was sometimes called “The Phoenix of Rome.” If Ms. de la Cruz were alive today, she would no doubt be quick to deduce that someone intimately familiar with Kircher’s life and works must have at some point decided to Kircherize the untold history of the Native Americans. At the very least, she would declare that the following six Kircherisms appear in The Book of Mormon:

1. The first character in The Book of Mormon is Nephi, a Jew from a prior millennium, who journeys through Arabia and sails to the promised land of America.

2. Nephi is guided by a spiritually magnetic compass, which is a spherical ball made of brass that has pointers, spindles, and writing on its sides. It only works when its holder maintains a state of personal righteousness, which idea is clearly based on Kircher’s concept of spiritual magnetism. The text calls this instrument “the Liahona,” which is undeniably the most well-known magical object in Mormonism (Figure 24).

3. Nephi makes use of brass and golden plates, chiseling into them the untold religious history of the New World going back to the Tower of Babel.

4. This rather Kircherized history also includes a “rediscovered message of Christianity in the hieroglyphic writings of the Aztecs” — with Jesus Christ showing himself to white Native Americans, who are referred to as Nephites in the text.

5. The entire narrative presents itself as having been written in a reformed Egyptian language (due to its supposed efficiency relative to Hebrew).

6. Mormon is the eponymous prophet-historian who serves as the chief architect of The Book of Mormon — an observation that warrants the following digression.

One of Kircher’s foreign contemporaries was the French Jesuit Pierre de Montmaur (pronounced mon‑'MOR without the /t/ sound). He, like Kircher, was also both a linguist and a professor. After teaching Greek at the Royal College of France (in Paris) for approximately twenty years, he got caught fabricating his sources by certain fact-checkers in the Republic of Letters. In short order, he was stripped of his academic position, duly defrocked by the Jesuits, and mercilessly mocked by the masses. For a good decade leading up to his defenestration, Montmaur had been pilloried in the “pamphlet wars” as a “parasite” — in both the gourmandizing and plagiaristic senses of the word. Montmaur quickly embraced the saucy sobriquet and, in his turn, boasted that he was “the greatest parasite that the globe has ever borne,” despite having previously called himself a “scribouille-poet” who lived exclusively “on love and stagnant water.” His critics then responded by saying: “Far from stagnant water, he was, in fact, the greatest parasite of the reign of Louis XIII. And a literary parasite at that!” Gui Patin once said of him: “He knew all the good tables in Paris, from most of which he had been chased like a parasite, not without dishonor and infamy. He had once been a Jesuit, from whence he was expelled for some falsity that he had put and fabricated in a few letters.” After passing away in 1650, Dubuisson-Aubenay noted in his journal: “Death of Sieur de Montmor [sic], royal professor in Greek, steward of currencies and inscriptions for the royal buildings of France. … He had benefices, titles, offices of the King, annuities, and a lot of money.” A widely publicized satire of Montmaur’s life was written in the summer of 1650, which was given the title Le Parasite Mormon: Histoire Comique [Mormon the Parasite: A Comic History]. It was originally published anonymously, but scholars now conclude that several writers may have contributed to it, with François de La Mothe le Vayer serving as its chief author. As we shall see, Vayer switched the syllables from mon‑'MOR to 'MOR‑mon to avoid legal action from the rich and powerful Montmaur family. It was voraciously read for about fifty years, but only in France. It has still never been translated into English.

For the Jesuits in Rome, the discovered plagiarism was the scandal of the century. Pope Innocent X extended no mercy to Pierre de Montmaur, preferring to make an example of him to the rest of his order. One can only imagine the terror that Kircher might have felt on a daily basis knowing what would happen to him if it were to be discovered (during the same pope’s reign) that he had also plagiarized the texts of the ancients, fabricated his career-making source, and had put egregious falsities in more than a few letters. Fortunately for Kircher, the next pope would be his closest friend, Fabius Chisius, the same who would later change his name to Alexander VII. If it were not for that alliance, Kircher’s treachery might have been discovered much earlier, perhaps leading to another pamphlet war and/or another comic history. It is also possible that upper management knew of Kircher’s misdeeds and decided to conceal them, fearing that the relatively new Jesuit order would not be able to survive a second scandal of such magnitude. Regardless, in the Republic of Letters, for the next hundred years, reputable linguists would eschew quoting from Kircher and his Mormon confrère “on principle,” relegating the terms “Nephi” and “Mormon” to the same opprobrious category — the one reserved for history’s most unreliable sources in matters of antiquity and chronology — as we shall see. Unlike Kircher, who at least achieved “the ignominious status of a footnote in the history of science,” his parasitic contemporary never even made it into the English version of Wikipedia. An entry on Pierre de Montmaur does, however, appear on the French version of the website, which I have translated and included in the Supporting Information (rather than have an appendix, I have opted to include such back matter in a PDF that can be freely accessed and downloaded at this book’s website). A handful of other Kircherisms that are much more subtle exist in The Book of Mormon, which I shall discuss in the appropriate sections of this book.

Mormons regard The Book of Mormon as a divine work literally written by ancient American prophets, which opinion, of course, is their right to have. That said, it is not antagonistic to any Mormon to state the fact that several other classes of anachronisms together with superabundant scientific evidence have already demonstrated that The Book of Mormon is not an ancient work. The most iconic of these anachronisms are steel swords, wheeled chariots, and various old-world animals (and crops) that did not exist in the New World until after 1492, to name just a few. Kircherisms likewise challenge the viability of the ancient-authorship theory; however, this book is geared more toward addressing the impact of Kircherisms on non-supernatural authorship theories. To be clear, herein I assume that a proper explanation for the creation of The Book of Mormon must be a natural one (i.e., accounts invoking the supernatural are viewed — to the extent that they might have been genuine — as reflections of an internal, subjective experience; they are taken therefore to be real in a meaningful, but not objective, sense). A priori, this work allows for (but does not assume) the idea that the entirety of The Book of Mormon could have been written by one person. Alternatively, evidence may show that a more complex composition process may have occurred, with manuscripts having been transmitted, inherited, or stolen. In other words, multiple sources and influences might have contributed in some fashion to a process that ultimately produced The Book of Mormon. This work does assume, however, that all of the above six Kircherisms were intentionally incorporated by someone at some point.

It is of course plausible that the Kircherisms are coincidental, though that is extremely improbable given their specificity and context. Nephi and Mormon are extremely rare proper nouns, and both allude to fictitious sources fabricated by Jesuit priests in the 1630s. Neither name appears in the literature (or culture) of ancient Americans, extant Native Americans, or Caucasian Americans. Neither do they appear as person names in the Bible, the Apocrypha, or any texts accessible to Joseph Smith between 1825 and 1829. Some historians have argued that Smith might have derived “Nephi” by truncating the word “Nephilim,” which does appear in the Hebrew Bible and is sometimes translated as “giants,” or by appropriating an obscure place-name from the Apocrypha. Such observations may have factored into the etymology that Kircher had in mind for his slippery rabbi, but it was not an invention of Smith. In the Supporting Information, I further explore the question of how specifically Kircher might have come up with the name of his career-making character.

In terms of the next Kircherism (i.e., the spiritually magnetic compass), it is true that the idea of being led by a spiritual force is a ubiquitous concept in works of both fiction and nonfiction. However, the incorporation of several specific details into the spiritually magnetic compass of The Book of Mormon suggests that independence is unlikely: 1) the compass is a three-dimensional sphere, not a disk, 2) it is made of brass and maybe glass, 3) it is adorned with writing on its sides, and 4) it has pointers and spindles that only function when the holder is spiritually aligned with God. That Nephi and Mormon, the bookending characters in the text, read from ancient brass plates, chisel their own story on less oxidizable golden plates, and write in reformed Egyptian strongly strengthens that dependency.

Going forward, this work takes as a fundamental premise that an author of at least one source text — which eventually became at least a part of The Book of Mormon — must have been intimately familiar with the life and works of Kircher and must have deliberately included those parallels for a specific purpose. Taking the Kircherisms as intentional, how should current authorship theories be modified? Put another way, did the specific author who introduced Kircherisms originally intend to compose fiction, nonfiction, or scripture? And how did the most original work evolve into what today presents itself as The Book of Mormon? Rest (and read) assured that not afar off, I shall reveal who precisely that specific author was and will answer the remaining questions in due course.

By all accounts, Smith was a great storyteller, and though he was not unintelligent, he was not educated enough to independently assimilate Kircherisms into his production. Nearly all Americans between 1780 and 1830 were totally ignorant of Kircher. No trace of him can be found in any of the books or libraries to which Smith was known to have been proximal before he began his dictation, which has been studied extensively. There is no evidence to suggest that Kircher was part of the cultural or literary milieu in rural, upstate New York in the years leading up to the publication of The Book of Mormon. Any assertion that Smith could have been so deeply educated on Kircher would demand some explanation as it would seem to defy testimony from Smith himself, Emma Hale Smith (his future wife), Lucy Mack Smith (his mother), and several others. Emma, for example, said that when the two were married in 1827, Joseph “could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter.” Mother Smith said in her memoir that Joseph “seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children.” In the introduction to The Joseph Smith Papers, Richard L. Bushman, a Mormon apologist, states that the “translations” of Smith, however one accounts for them, “exceed anything one would expect from a poorly educated rural visionary. … The origins of the translations are not easily identified to everyone’s satisfaction. Smith had little education and no history of literary experimentation. Indeed, nothing in his background prepared him either to translate or to lead a church.” Indeed, most sects of Mormonism today frame Smith as a particularly uneducated farm boy utterly incapable of having thought up, let alone composed, The Book of Mormon, which framing they use to support the idea that it must have come about through supernatural means. Though he could neither write nor spell well and almost always used a scribe, Smith was not illiterate; he possessed solid oratory skills and had an impressive talent for memorization. Because Smith’s ability to memorize and misdirect will factor into all authorship theories to be discussed, the following context is necessary upfront.

In 1987 Michael Quinn, a Mormon historian and Professor at BYU, concluded that Smith was “a talented magician” and a “necromancer” — a deduction that he supported with unprecedented detail in his book, Early Mormonism and the Magic World View. Today, even Mormon apologists fully accept Quinn’s conclusion: “Now, most historians, Mormon or not, who work with the sources, accept as fact Joseph Smith’s career as village magician. Too many of his closest friends and family admitted as much, and some of Joseph’s own revelations support the contention.” It should be said, however, that a mystical and magical worldview was much more pervasive and integrated into the lower classes of society two centuries ago than it is today, which elementary-school textbooks covering the Salem witch trials understandably gloss over pretty quickly. Father Smith (Joseph Smith, Sr.) had been born and raised in Topsfield, one of three major towns in which arrests had been made during the trials; as it would turn out, all eight of Father Smith’s great-grandparents had lived in (or around) Salem, Massachusetts during the hysteria — and several (if not all) of those great-grandparents had been magi themselves. For generations thereafter, the Smiths were compelled to practice their sacred rites in relative secrecy. However, the Smith family did have a passed-down belief that someone in their line of descendants would emerge as a great scryer and openly restore their transmundane practices to their former glory. Father Smith had hoped that he himself could fill such shoes, but in time, he came to believe that one of his sons was that chosen scryer instead. As off-putting as midnight chants, rusty swords, magic circles, and sprinkled blood might strike many of us today, there was nothing overtly satanic or Mephistophelian about their rituals. One might say that they were more uncomely and unsightly than they were ungodly — well, most of the time.

As a scryer, Smith’s primary function was to look into the bowels of the earth to find where buried treasure had been secreted. Secondarily, it was to convince a farmer to pay him (and his father) to dig for it, “going shares” with them should any treasure be found. His activities several times put him on the wrong side of the law. In March 1826 Smith was arrested for vagrancy, glass-looking, and disorderly conduct, which was approximately two years before he would start dictating sentences to Martin Harris, his first scribe. In a preliminary hearing held in South Bainbridge, New York, witnesses testified that Smith had “laid a book open upon a white cloth and proposed looking through another stone, which was white and transparent; [he] held the stone to the candle, turned his back to [the] book, and read.” Smith apparently had memorized at least one book word-for-word and had used it as a prop to convince gullible farmers that he had the gift of “second sight,” which he could ostensibly use to locate any buried treasure that might reside on a farmer’s plot of land — for a modest fee. Not surprisingly, the Judge regarded such courtroom theatrics more as a confession than as a defense, which contributed to a guilty verdict and Smith being run out of the county on “leg bail.” Back then, leg bail meant that you agreed to “run your legs” to a different jurisdiction and dare not return for at least six months lest a warrant be issued for your arrest, thereby triggering a full trial at your own expense on the original misdemeanor and additional charges. It was a common way in the 1820s for a municipality to avoid the costs of litigation for nonresident, underage troublemakers roaming from county to county.

Smith had acquired this particular confidence trick (and several others) from Luman Walters, a notorious “tatterdemalion,” who was quite known in the region for having memorized Cicero’s Orations and for having similarly worked it into his schemes. That Smith used his seer stone and memorization skills for at least three years to deceive many a farmer (before endeavoring to publish The Book of Mormon) is finally becoming mainstream, even among Mormon apologists. Multiple accounts show that throughout his dictation to Harris in 1828, Smith would routinely place his translucent seer stone at the bottom of his stovepipe top hat ostensibly so that the ambient light would not interfere with the spiritual light in the stone. One year later, his dictation process to Oliver Cowdery, his second scribe, would be similar but with slight differences — swapping out the whitish stone for the chocolate-colored one that had become his favorite. Despite a consistent modus operandi, it does not necessarily follow that Smith deliberately and wholeheartedly deceived his scribes, his family, and his future acolytes when it came to dictating The Book of Mormon — though that, of course, is always possible. Neither does it necessarily follow that he was delusional. It is true that deception and delusion are the two most facile and commonly cited motives attributed to Smith; however, less polarizing motivations emerge in theories that do not require sole authorship.

Nevertheless, for the time being, if we were to temporarily stipulate Smith as the sole author of The Book of Mormon (for the sake of argument), then somehow, he must have been quite familiar with Kircher’s life and works. Even if we cannot identify how that could have been the case, we must ask the following critical question: why would Smith include such specific, memorable, and undermining Kircherisms in a book that he intended to present as both scripture and historical nonfiction? One (unlikely) possibility is that Smith may have originally planned to release his work as fiction. He perhaps latched onto the Kircherisms the same way that any creative writer absorbs and recycles memes from favorite sources of inspiration. Only later did he decide, as the case may (or may not) be, to recast his narrative as an authentic religious history of ancient America — peradventure to increase its marketability vis-à-vis the Bible, to establish prophetic credibility, or for some other reason. At that point, it might have been too late to remove or obscure the Kircherisms, having spoken to others about some of the details, according to multiple accounts. If Smith worried that his most educated readers might identify the Kircherisms— thereby betraying the work as fiction — he did nothing to manage that risk. On the other hand, Smith might have been confident that no one else would pick up on the Kircherisms; if so, why did he think that they wouldn’t? If Kircherisms had been accessible to Smith (again, for the sake of argument), then, especially given his lack of literary acquirements, it stands to reason that they would have been accessible to nearly everyone. And if they were so generally accessible (they weren’t), it is highly improbable that no one else would have recognized them. And if someone did, why did no one write about them in diaries, journals, or newspapers? Such a missed opportunity surely would have been exploited by one of Smith’s many detractors, especially given the volume of discrediting and disparaging statements that were made against Smith and his family.

Another possibility is that Smith might have originally planned to write something that he hoped would be taken as nonfiction for hundreds of pages so that he could more poignantly and dramatically reveal — at the climax, near the end, or perhaps in an epilogue — that the work was pure fiction all along. It could be that he wanted to mimic the detective novel, sprinkling in sufficient clues from even the very first page — “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” — so that even the most scrupulous reader would be diverted at the big reveal. Alternatively, he might have originally decided to delay disclosing the “true story” of Nephi for many years, thereby increasing the impact of what would have been a well-meant social commentary — that gullibility was worryingly on the rise in rural America. Even more cynically, Smith may have employed Kircherisms as a way of mocking his readers and future followers for nothing more than his own amusem*nt. Such cozenage was unfortunately not beneath him. On one occasion, Smith reportedly convinced his parents and siblings that he had a life-destroying object hidden in his frock: “for, says I, no man can see it with the naked eye and live.” Terrified, they all fled the room in fear of catching an accidental glance. “‘Now,’ said Jo, ‘I have got the damned fools fixed, and will carry out the fun,’” recalled Peter Ingersoll. There are other examples, not a few, of Smith playing medium-sized mind games and mincing his words.

Notwithstanding, it does stretch the imagination to envision a scenario in which Smith might have convinced himself — after somehow learning that Kircher invented one Nephi, one spiritually magnetic compass, and one reformed Egyptian language — that an entirely unrelated ancient Nephi literally, not figuratively, sailed to America aided by a completely separate spiritually magnetic compass and wrote about it coincidentally in reformed Egyptian. If Smith did earnestly believe this, then it would seem that he must have suffered, at best, from dream-reality confusion and, at worst, from some delusional disorder. Kircherisms, again, do seem to make deception and/or delusion on the part of Smith more unavoidable under sole authorship. They also reduce the probability of the sole-authorship theory — even to the point of implausibility, as we shall see. However, that does not mean that the sole-authorship theory should be dismissed (or even discounted) just yet. The only responsible thing for an honest seeker of truth to do when confronted with new evidence is to flesh out, strengthen, and steelman all the available mechanisms (as optimally as possible) before starting to attack them.

In that spirit of truth, we must investigate the sources and influences, however improbable, that might have exposed Smith (or someone else) to the memes that eventually became Kircherisms in The Book of Mormon. We can then address the following crucial questions. How accessible were those sources to Smith and to the other candidate authors? How likely were those sources to have inspired them to the extent that they would choose to feature Kircherisms so prominently in their writing? What are all the conceivable mechanisms that could explain the origin of The Book of Mormon, and how should they be modified by this new information? Which methodologies are best suited for analyzing the body of evidence, both old and new, so that we might effectively separate the sheep from the goats? As this book will show, and I hope the reader will agree, one explanation will bear the ring of truth more than any of the others — one theory to rule them all.

To learn more, visit: www.HowTheBookOfMormonCameToPass.com. To purchase the book, click here.

Lars Pauling Nielsen is an independent researcher of Mormon history and a first-time author. He earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 2007 and an MBA from Harvard Business School in 2009. He currently resides in Minnetonka, Minn., with his three daughters. He resigned from the Mormon church in 2010.Nielsen was also awhistleblower in a 2019 Religion Unplugged story that detailed the Mormon church’s secret finances.