This chapter deals with the publication of the Book of Mormon. This is very important. While the Bible is the foundational text of Christianity, the Restored Church is founded upon both the Bible and the Book of Mormon. The Bible led Joseph to the grove to pray. Prayer led to the Book of Mormon, which is the basis for priesthood restoration, dozens of revelations given to Joseph, and even the modern temple (the endowment IS in there).

As with translation, the printing process was not easy. The publisher, E.B. Grandin, insisted on having the full $3000 paid before he would print 5000 copies of the book. In today’s money, that would be the equivalent of $82,000, about $16.40 per book for printing.

Joseph worked his farm in Harmony, while Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris and Hyrum Smith oversaw the publication. To protect the manuscript, Oliver made a copy. Then he would take a few pages, enough for a day’s work, to the publisher for preparation. They would engage int he tedious work of reviewing the sheets, to ensure there were no misspellings, etc.

In one of his letters to Joseph, Oliver wrote:

“When I begin to write on the mercies of God,” he told Joseph, “I know not when to stop, but time and paper fail.”⁹

Even as the book was being published, it was a tool of conversion. Thomas Marsh, unsettled by the traditional Christian Churches, went in search of something better. After traveling several hundreds of miles, he heard of the Book of Mormon, and went to Palmyra and Grandin. Grandin gave him a sheet with 16 pages on it, ,which he read and took home to show his wife, Elizabeth. They both instantly believed. Continue reading →

The late High Nibley was right about many, many things. The auto-didactic BYU Professor/Super man popularized Mormon apologetics and may be the single smartest Latter-day Saint ever. I will never forget the first thing I read of his, and this was before I joined the Church as an adult: “No Ma’am, That’s Not History,” his evisceration of Fawn Brodie’s ridiculous biography of Joseph Smith. I had read Brodie’s “No Man Knows My History” and found it strange because it was, even to my then non-LDS eyes, so clearly ahistorical and, frankly, laughable. So when I read Nibley’s response I thought: “here is a man, like HL Mencken, who knows how to bury the absurd.”

Since joining the Church, I have read everything I could find by Nibley, and I have even listened to many of his lectures, which you can now find on Youtube. And, like many of you, I have enjoyed almost everything I have read and watched. I love Nibley’s writing style, his use of sources and his wide range of knowledge. There is no disputing he was a very great man and a great scholar.

But even great men can be wrong about some things, and in Nibley’s case he is as wrong as he can be about the whole issue of real-world economics and how it applies to our lives today. I refer here to the essays in his book “Approaching Zion,” all of which I have read many times.

These essays, at least some of which were delivered in live talks, are thought-provoking and deliberately shocking. And I like thought-provoking and deliberately shocking essays because they challenge my belief system. Taking another look at your paradigm is never a bad thing, and this is clearly Nibley’s goal.

And many of Nibley’s points are surely correct: our world is too materialistic, we do not spend enough time doing good in the world, we should voluntarily consecrate ourselves and our talents to the Church. These reminders are welcome and on point.

But Nibley goes much further than this: he proposes that the way almost all latter-day Saints live today is evil and on the side of Satan, rather than God. An honest reader cannot peruse these essays without seeing that as his primary message. Nibley has the same dripping sarcasm and disdain for us that he has for Fawn Brodie’s very poor book on Joseph Smith.
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