The Lost 116 Pages Reconstructing The Book Of Mormons Missing Stories

On a summer day in 1828, Book of Mormon scribe and witness Martin Harris was emptying drawers, upending furniture, and ripping apart mattresses as he desperately looked for a stack of papers he had sworn to God to protect. Those pages containing the only copy of the first three months of the Joseph Smith's translation of the golden plates were forever lost, and the detailed stories they held forgotten over the ensuing years--until now. In this highly anticipated work, author Don Bradley presents over a decade of historical and scriptural research to not only tell the story of the lost pages but to reconstruct many of the detailed stories written on them. Questions explored and answered include: Was the lost manuscript actually 116 pages? How did Mormon's abridgment of this period differ from the accounts in Nephi's small plates? Where did the brass plates and Laban's sword come from? How did Lehi's family and their descendants live the Law of Moses without the temple and Aaronic priesthood? How did the Liahona operate? Why is Joseph of Egypt emphasized so much in the Book of Mormon? How were the first Nephites similar to the very last? What message did God write on the temple wall for Aminadi to translate? How did the Jaredite interpreters come into the hands of the Nephite kings? Why was King Benjamin so beloved by his people? Despite the likely demise of those pages to the sands of time, the answers to these questions and many more are now available for the first time in nearly two centuries in The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon's Missing Stories.

Mark Twain once derided the Book of Mormon as "chloroform in print." Long and complicated, written in the language of the King James version of the Bible, it boggles the minds of many. Yet it is unquestionably one of the most influential books ever written. With over 140 million copies in print, it is a central text of one of the largest and fastest-growing faiths in the world. And, Grant Hardy shows, it's far from the coma-inducing doorstop caricatured by Twain. In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Hardy offers the first comprehensive analysis of the work's narrative structure in its 180 year history. Unlike virtually all other recent world scriptures, the Book of Mormon presents itself as an integrated narrative rather than a series of doctrinal expositions, moral injunctions, or devotional hymns. Hardy takes readers through its characters, events, and ideas, as he explores the story and its messages. He identifies the book's literary techniques, such as characterization, embedded documents, allusions, and parallel narratives. Whether Joseph Smith is regarded as author or translator, it's noteworthy that he never speaks in his own voice; rather, he mediates nearly everything through the narrators Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Hardy shows how each has a distinctive voice, and all are woven into an integral whole. As with any scripture, the contending views of the Book of Mormon can seem irreconcilable. For believers, it is an actual historical document, transmitted from ancient America. For nonbelievers, it is the work of a nineteenth-century farmer from upstate New York. Hardy transcends this intractable conflict by offering a literary approach, one appropriate to both history and fiction. Regardless of whether readers are interested in American history, literature, comparative religion, or even salvation, he writes, the book can best be read if we examine the text on its own terms.

As the ancient prophet Mormon edited the scriptural texts that would become the Book of Mormon, he must have had a map in his mind of the places and physical features that comprised the setting for the events described in that book. Mormon's Map is Book of Mormon scholar John Sorenson's reconstruction of that mental map solely from information gleaned from the text after years of intensive study. He describes his method; establishes the overall shape of Book of Mormon lands; sorts out details of topography, distance, direction, climate, and civilization; and treats issues of historical geography. The resultant map will facilitate analysis of geography-related issues in the Book of Mormon narrative and also be of help in evaluating theories about where in the real world the Nephite lands were located.

The author demonstrates that the Book of Mormon is a native Mesoamerican book (or codex) that exhibits what one would expect of a historical document produced in the context of ancient Mesoamerican civilization. He also shows that scholars' discoveries about Mesoamerica and the contents of the Nephite record are clearly related, listing more than 400 points where the Book of Mormon text corresponds to characteristic Mesoamerican situations, statements, allusions, and history.

Mr. Mormon can take a normal LDS member and turn them into a Super-Mormon by using new ideas & discoveries from science, the cosmos, world history and the scriptures. Mr. Mormon teaches about a super nova that was recorded by Chinese astronomers at the time of the birth of Jesus. It discovers that Joseph Smith taught the theory of time relativity over a half of a century before Albert Einstein. It proves that Moses could not have been writing fiction as his account in Genesis states that the moon and the sun were created on the 4th day of a 6th day creation period aligning perfectly with the 14 billion year time line of the universe. It fills in the gaps between the creation story verses the evolution of man on planet earth. It solves that age old question about Adam's paradox in the Garden of Eden with the dilemma of breaking one of God's commandments in order to keep the other commandment. The author has received hundreds of messages and letters from Mormon Missionaries all over the world, thanking him for writing this book as it explains the Mormon perspective in a fun and simplistic way.

The war in Heaven was not about force! Satan's plan threatened accountability by offering a "do as you please" program without penalty. This book explains how both ancient and modern Gadiantons have used this "freedom plan" to get elected. It also shows how parents unknowingly use this plan when they adopt the many "love without law" programs taught by the philosophies of men. This book exposes Satan's popular deceptions by helping readers understand the difference between choice, freedom and agency.

Mormonism's founder, Joseph Smith, claimed to have translated ancient scriptures. He dictated an American Bible from metal plates reportedly buried by ancient Jews in a nearby hill, and produced an Egyptian "Book of Abraham" derived from funerary papyri he extracted from a collection of mummies he bought from a traveling showman. In addition, he rewrote sections of the King James Version as a "New Translation" of the Bible. Smith and his followers used the term translation to describe the genesis of these English scriptures, which remain canonical for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Whether one believes him or not, the discussion has focused on whether Smith's English texts represent literal translations of extant source documents. On closer inspection, though, Smith's translations are far more metaphysical than linguistic. In Joseph Smith's Translation, Samuel Morris Brown argues that these translations express the mystical power of language and scripture to interconnect people across barriers of space and time, especially in the developing Mormon temple liturgy. He shows that Smith was devoted to an ancient metaphysics--especially the principle of correspondence, the concept of "as above, so below"--that provided an infrastructure for bridging the human and the divine as well as for his textual interpretive projects. Joseph Smith's projects of metaphysical translation place Mormonism at the productive edge of the transitions associated with shifts toward "secular modernity." This transition into modern worldviews intensified, complexly, in nineteenth-century America. The evolving legacies of Reformation and Enlightenment were the sea in which early Mormons swam, says Brown. Smith's translations and the theology that supported them illuminate the power and vulnerability of the Mormon critique of American culture in transition. This complex critique continues to resonate and illuminate to the present day.

Mormon Doctrine in the Apocrypha: a Concordance of Teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Extracanonical Writings is an alphabetical listing of 179 distinct teachings of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that are attested in 66 ancient sacred texts that are not a part of the biblical canon, along with the corresponding teachings from those ancient texts. At the end of the volume is the section entitled "The Extracanonical Sources" wherein bibliographies and brief descriptions of each of the cited extracanonical works are listed alphabetically, followed by and an index of the sources, followed by a general index.