The complete online text of The Book of Mormon by Joseph Smith, Jr..

Joseph Smith (1805-1844), American religious leader, was the founder of a unique American sect, the Mormons, or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. On December 23, 1805, Joseph Smith was born in Vermont; in 1816 his family migrated to wester...

IN APRIL 1830 the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints was formally organised, with six members. (1) The scriptural foundation of the church was the Book of Mormon, which had just been published. Mormon Prophet-Founder Joseph Smith, who held the copyright as...

Mormons in America. By Claudia Lauper Bushman and Richard Lyman Bushman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. 144 pp. $24.00 cloth. Richard and Claudia Bushman bring to the Oxford series on Religion in American Life a superior knowledge of their subject and...

The introduction to the 2006 edition of the Book of Mormon has a new word: among.It sounds trivial, but to some it represents a huge change to teachings that have been passed on for generations within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.The new...

Russell Martin Harris celebrated his 86th birthday Friday by giving a gift to the Mormon church _ a leather wallet carried by his great-great-grandfather in the 1830s.That's better than it first sounds. It was that ancestor, Martin Harris, who mortgaged his farm to get the...

In the following essay, St. John Stott explains why—regardless of whether The Book of Mormon was a product of Smith's own imagination or not—it is perfectly understandable that Smith would claim that the words were indeed God's own.

In the excerpt below, Shipps provides a comprehensive, chronological background of Joseph Smith's life prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon. Shipps maintains that examining the religious, psychic, social, and economical impact of the "Burnt-Over District" on the Smith family best contextualizes Mormonism's foundational claims and elucidates the integral relationship between magic and religious seership in Smith's early life.

Brodie, a distinguished biographer and historian and Senior Lecturer in the Department of History at UCLA, is considered a leading authority on Mormon history. In the following excerpt from her biography of Joseph Smith, originally published in 1945, Br odie discusses the content and style of the Book of Mormon and the events surrounding its publication.