The Lost 116 Pages: Examining the Claims

A scholarly response to ldsdiscussions.com’s “Book of Mormon Overview: The Lost 116 Pages”

Introduction

The loss of 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript in the summer of 1828 is one of the most examined and emotionally charged episodes in early Latter-day Saint history. The website ldsdiscussions.com presents it as a fatal blow to Joseph Smith’s prophetic credibility, arguing that the incident exposes fraud, that D&C 10 is a self-serving fabrication, that the “small plates” solution was invented after the fact, and that linguistic fingerprints throughout 1 Nephi betray a single nineteenth-century author. These are serious arguments that deserve careful engagement rather than dismissal.

This article examines each major claim in turn. It draws on the historical record, Latter-day Saint scholarship, and the internal logic of the text itself. The conclusion reached here is that ldsdiscussions.com’s presentation, while internally coherent, rests on a series of contestable assumptions it presents as settled facts, and that the evidence supports a more complex and nuanced picture than its confident tone implies.

I. What Actually Happened in 1828 — Historical Baseline

Before evaluating arguments, the historical record must be established carefully. What is not in dispute: In the spring of 1828, Martin Harris served as Joseph Smith’s scribe for approximately two months. Harris asked, repeatedly, for permission to take the manuscript to his home in Palmyra to show his family, particularly his skeptical wife, Lucy Harris. Joseph inquired of the Lord twice and received a negative answer both times. On a third inquiry, permission was granted with conditions. Harris took the pages; the manuscript disappeared and has never been recovered.

What is genuinely disputed is who took the pages and what happened to them. Ldsdiscussions.com states the manuscript was “most likely taken by his wife Lucy.” This assertion is presented as near-certain, but the historical evidence is far less clear. Historian Don Bradley, who has conducted the most exhaustive modern research on the lost manuscript, argues that the narrative blaming Lucy Harris “was proposed as only a speculative possibility a quarter-century after the fact” and that sensationalism rather than evidence drove its popularity. E.D. Howe, writing in 1834 in the hostile anti-Mormon Mormonism Unvailed, noted that “they sometimes charge the wife of Harris with having burnt it; but this is denied by her.” Martin Harris’s own son later reported that his father, after Lucy Harris’s deathbed denial, came to regard the manuscript’s disappearance as “a mystery.”

This is not a minor point. Ldsdiscussions.com’s entire critique of D&C 10 depends on the manuscript being safely in hostile hands and available for alteration. If the pages were destroyed shortly after their loss — as multiple independent sources suggest — the scenario described in D&C 10 becomes historically moot rather than implausible.

II. The Seer Stone and the Failure to Recover the Pages

Ldsdiscussions.com argues that Joseph Smith’s failure to use his seer stone to locate the lost pages proves the stone had no actual revelatory power. If Joseph could allegedly see a pin in a pile of shavings, why couldn’t he find the manuscript?

This argument conflates two categorically different activities in the nineteenth-century folk-magic worldview: treasure seeking and prophetic translation. The accounts of Joseph’s treasure-seeking activities, including the pin-in-shavings story, come from a context in which he functioned as a local scryer helping neighbors find lost objects or buried treasure. That activity had a very different cultural and theological valence than receiving scripture. Joseph himself drew a sharp distinction between his early folk-magic activities and his prophetic calling after 1827. The fact that he did not use his stone to “find” the pages is entirely consistent with the revelatory framework he operated within, in which God was not obligated to compensate for human disobedience by providing convenient miracles on demand.

Furthermore, the text of D&C 3, received shortly after the loss, records God explicitly telling Joseph that the plates and interpreters had been temporarily withdrawn as a consequence of his disobedience in granting Harris permission: “And behold, how oft you have transgressed the commandments and the laws of God, and have gone on in the persuasions of men.” In this theological frame, the appropriate response to losing the pages was repentance, not scrrying. The argument that Joseph “should have” attempted to locate the pages misreads the internal logic of the revelatory situation he understood himself to be in.

The deeper problem with the seer-stone argument is that it demands prophets behave as magicians — that divine gifts must perform on command regardless of context or moral condition. But this is not how prophetic gifts function within any major religious tradition. Elijah could call fire from heaven and then flee in fear for his life; miracles in scripture routinely cease when obedience fails. Applying a different standard to Joseph Smith proves too much.

III. D&C 10: Self-Serving Fabrication or Authentic Revelation?

The heart of ldsdiscussions.com’s case is that D&C 10 is a post-hoc rationalization Joseph Smith invented to cover his inability to reproduce the lost text. The site offers several sub-arguments: the forgery scenario is implausible; the same vulnerability would apply to other parts of the Book of Mormon; and the revelation’s references to “small plates” are anachronistic.

Let us address each in turn.

Was the Forgery Scenario Implausible?

Ldsdiscussions.com argues it would have been impossible to forge convincing alterations to the manuscript because the necessary skills and resources didn’t exist. This reflects a serious historical misunderstanding. Lucy Mack Smith’s own account, cited by critics themselves, records that the purpose of taking the pages was specifically to produce them when a retranslation appeared and identify the discrepancies. You don’t need sophisticated forgery skills to accomplish this: you need only the original manuscript and the willingness to claim the retranslation is different. If Joseph dictated a second version that varied even slightly from the first — which translation theory suggests it inevitably would — the original could be produced and the differences highlighted as proof of fraud. The trap did not require altering a single word; it required preserving the original and waiting.

This is precisely what D&C 10 describes: “And, behold, Satan hath put it into their hearts to alter the words which you have caused to be written… and thus they have sought to destroy your credibility by claiming the two documents are different.” The scenario is not that someone would create a sophisticated forgery; it is that someone would preserve the original to compare against the retranslation. That scenario is entirely plausible given the documented hostility of Lucy Harris.

Does the Same Vulnerability Apply to the Rest of the Book of Mormon?

Ldsdiscussions.com argues that if God protected Joseph from comparison-trap fraud in D&C 10, the same protection should have been applied to other sections. But this misunderstands the specific vulnerability. The 116 pages were the only portion of the manuscript that had been taken from Joseph’s custody and potentially retained by hostile parties before publication. The rest of the manuscript was under continuous custody. The exposure was unique to those pages because only those pages had been borrowed and lost under disputed circumstances.

Are D&C 10’s References to “Plates of Nephi” Anachronistic?

This is a sophisticated argument by ldsdiscussions.com, and it deserves a sophisticated answer. The site claims D&C 10 “never actually mentions small plates” and that the revelation’s instruction to translate the “plates of Nephi” refers to a larger, unabridged record — not the small plates. It then argues this proves Joseph made up the small-plates solution later.

BYU scholar J.B. Haws has responded directly to this interpretive question: since Joseph Smith received D&C 10 before he had translated the small plates, he would not yet have had reason to distinguish “large” and “small” plates of Nephi by name. The phrase “plates of Nephi” in the revelation would naturally refer to whatever Nephi-authored source material was available — which, in the event, turned out to be the small plates. The linguistic consistency of the revelation with Joseph’s actual ignorance of the plate distinction at the time of receiving it is, paradoxically, an argument for authenticity rather than against it. A savvy post-hoc fabricator would have specified “small plates” to make the revelation appear more precisely predictive.

Additionally, the tone of D&C 3 and D&C 10 toward Joseph Smith is notably self-incriminating from a fabrication standpoint. A prophet inventing a revelation to cover a failure would be unlikely to include such blunt rebukes as “thou art Joseph, and thou wast chosen to do the work of the Lord, but because of transgression, if thou art not aware thou wilt fall.” Richard Bushman notes that these revelations contain “an independent prophetic voice” that authentically chastises Joseph without offering him convenient escape. This internal feature is difficult to explain if the revelations are fraudulent cover stories.

IV. Why Didn’t Joseph Simply Retranslate?

Ldsdiscussions.com argues that retranslating would have been the ultimate proof of Joseph’s calling, and that his refusal to attempt it is the most damning evidence of fraud. The logic: if translation was tight and mechanical (word-for-word through the seer stone), a second translation would be identical, proving authenticity. If it was loose, the two versions would differ but in minor ways explainable by translation theory.

This argument has real force, and it would be dishonest to simply dismiss it. However, it contains a critical asymmetry. The site assumes the result of retranslation would be either identically vindicating or mildly different. But consider the actual strategic situation Joseph faced. If the pages had been retained by hostile parties, producing a second translation would immediately surface a comparison. Any divergence — even a single name rendered differently, one genealogy with an added or missing entry, one speech slightly paraphrased — would be amplified by critics as proof of fraud. Witnesses and scribes had heard the first translation dictated. Emma Smith knew the content. Differences would be detectable and would have been weaponized.

Furthermore, the site’s argument commits what might be called the “no-lose fallacy.” It posits that retranslation had no downside unless Joseph was a fraud. But even granting sincere belief in his prophetic calling, retranslation carried genuine risk precisely because the translation process — as witnesses described it — was not a photocopier. It was a living, revelatory process that could reasonably produce equivalent but not identical results. In that case, the retranslation would be different not because of fraud but because of the nature of inspired translation, and critics would still use the differences to attack credibility. Joseph was explicitly told by revelation not to retranslate. From within a prophetic framework, obeying that instruction regardless of how it looks to outsiders is exactly what prophetic integrity demands.

The FAIR Latter-day Saints analysis adds a pointed observation: if Joseph’s critics later produced the original pages after a new translation was published, D&C 10’s preemptive description of the conspiracy would become powerful evidence for Joseph’s prophetic foreknowledge, not against it. The critics would have faced the awkward situation of fulfilling the very scenario he publicly predicted.

V. The Small Plates: Invented After the Fact or Providentially Prepared?

This section of ldsdiscussions.com’s argument is the most developed, and it requires the most careful response. The site argues that the small plates were an ad-hoc invention, that the text exhibits patterns of deliberate vagueness to prevent comparison with the lost 116 pages, and that the knowledge-progression anomalies (early prophets knowing more than middle prophets) prove a single nineteenth-century author wrote the entire text after knowing how it would end.

The Vagueness Argument

Ldsdiscussions.com identifies a pattern of vagueness in 1 Nephi through Jacob: unnamed wives, unnamed children, unnamed cities, few new characters. It argues this is deliberately designed to prevent comparison with the original 116 pages. This is a coherent hypothesis, but there is a competing explanation that fits the evidence equally well: the small plates are an explicitly spiritual record.

“The ministry and the prophecies, the more plain and precious parts of them, should be written upon these plates; and that the things which were written should be kept for the instruction of my people, who should possess the land, and also for other wise purposes, which purposes are known unto the Lord.” — 1 Nephi 19:3

Jacob explicitly states his record should touch “lightly” on history. This is not a convenient excuse invented to explain missing names; it is an internal record-keeping philosophy that explains the text’s character. The large plates — the Book of Lehi, now lost — contained the civil and political history with names, cities, and genealogical detail. The small plates contained spiritual content. A record-keeper who explicitly says he is keeping a spiritual rather than a historical record not naming every wife and child is behaving exactly as stated, not suspiciously avoiding falsifiable specifics.

It is also worth noting that ldsdiscussions.com’s argument here is self-reinforcing in a circular way: any vagueness in the small plates is attributed to fraud; any time a city or name appears (such as the Liahona being named in Alma), the site treats that as a suspicious late insertion. The framework makes it impossible for any feature of the text to count as evidence against the fraud hypothesis.

The Knowledge-Progression Anomaly

Ldsdiscussions.com notes that Nephi in 1 Nephi knows Christ will be born in Jerusalem (600 years hence), that he will rise from the dead, that he will minister in the Americas — while King Benjamin, Alma, and other middle-book prophets seem to have less specific prophetic knowledge of these same events. The site argues this reversal proves single authorship: Joseph wrote the middle books first, then wrote 1 Nephi knowing the ending, and front-loaded it with too much precision.

This is worth taking seriously, but there are multiple responses. First, the premise that middle-book prophets are ignorant of the specifics found in 1 Nephi is overstated. King Benjamin speaks with remarkable specificity about Christ’s name, his ministry, his atoning blood (Mosiah 3). Alma 7 describes Christ’s birth “at Jerusalem” with striking specificity. The argument that middle-book prophets are vague about Christ requires considerable cherry-picking of evidence.

Second, the small plates explicitly record that Nephi had access to the brass plates of Laban, a record of extraordinary historical and prophetic depth. The brass plates contained writings of Isaiah and many other prophets not preserved in the Old Testament. If the brass plates are granted as a genuine ancient record (even hypothetically for argument’s sake), then Nephi having more detailed prophetic knowledge than later Nephites who had less access to the same source material is historically explicable, not suspicious.

Third, and most fundamentally, the knowledge-progression argument would apply with equal force to the Old Testament itself, where prophets in earlier books (Isaiah, Jeremiah) have more elaborate messianic prophecies than some later books, and where the specificity of prophetic detail is not neatly correlated with chronological position. If this pattern proves single authorship in the Book of Mormon, it would prove the same in the Hebrew Bible. Most scholars would reject that inference.

VI. The Linguistic Argument: “Therefore” vs. “Wherefore”

Ldsdiscussions.com presents what it considers a smoking-gun linguistic fingerprint: the word “therefore” predominates in Mosiah through Ether, while “wherefore” begins appearing in Ether and continues through the small plates material. Since the small plates were translated last (after Mosiah through Moroni), this simultaneous shift proves a single author changed his vocabulary mid-project. The same shift appearing in the Doctrine and Covenants allegedly shows this is Joseph Smith’s evolving speaking style.

This argument has several significant weaknesses. First, “wherefore” and “therefore” are both found throughout the entire Book of Mormon and the KJV Bible. The claim that there is a dramatic, telling shift requires careful statistical analysis that ldsdiscussions.com does not provide. The argument is asserted, not demonstrated.

Second, if the Book of Mormon translation process involved Joseph Smith rendering ancient concepts into nineteenth-century English idiom, some degree of stylistic consistency with his own era would be expected regardless of authorship. The presence of English vocabulary patterns in a translation from a non-English source is not evidence of fabrication; it is what translation looks like.

Third, Stanford Carmack, Royal Skousen, and other researchers have documented that the Book of Mormon’s language contains extensive Early Modern English features — grammar and syntax characteristic of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English that Joseph Smith, as a nineteenth-century rural New Yorker, would not plausibly have produced deliberately. This is not consistent with the single-author-in-real-time theory ldsdiscussions.com proposes. The linguistic data cuts both ways, and the site presents only the portion it finds convenient.

The Doctrine and Covenants parallel, meanwhile, proves only that Joseph Smith spoke English. Of course his revelations and the Book of Mormon share vocabulary; they were dictated in the same language, through the same human instrument, in the same decade. Shared vocabulary between texts produced by the same translator is not authorship evidence; it is a baseline expectation.

VII. The Providential Design Argument: Ancient Preparation for a Modern Crisis

When the small plates solution is evaluated from within the Book of Mormon’s own internal framework, a striking feature emerges that ldsdiscussions.com never adequately addresses: multiple authors separated by centuries independently testify that the small plates were created for a “wise purpose” they did not fully understand.

“Wherefore, the Lord hath commanded me to make these plates for a wise purpose in him, which purpose I know not.” — 1 Nephi 9:5

“And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus it whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will.” — Words of Mormon 1:7

Nephi, writing around 600 BC, states he was commanded to make a duplicate set of plates for a purpose he didn’t know. Mormon, writing approximately 400 AD, likewise records that he was prompted to append the small plates to his compilation for a purpose he only partially understood. Both men record their uncertainty about why they were doing what they were doing. From a textual standpoint, this is an extraordinary feature: the internal narrative builds in witnesses to its own providential logic centuries before the event that would vindicate that logic.

Ldsdiscussions.com’s explanation for this feature is that Joseph Smith invented the small plates after writing the end of the Book of Mormon and therefore could retroactively plant these “wise purpose” statements. But this requires Joseph Smith to have been not just a confident con man but a remarkably sophisticated literary architect, embedding self-vindicating witness statements across multiple fictional narrators separated by a thousand years, all converging on a crisis he was simultaneously in the process of manufacturing a solution to. The simpler explanation — that the texts reflect what they claim to reflect — has at least equal evidential standing.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell summarized the believer’s position well: “In the episode involving the lost manuscript from the Book of Mormon, we see the interplay of the foreknowledge of God and the agency of man… and the perfect foresight of a loving Lord who 1,500 years before the emergency was ready with an alternative.”

VIII. Don Bradley’s Scholarship: What We Are Missing

A significant gap in ldsdiscussions.com’s analysis is its failure to engage with the most thorough modern scholarly work on the lost pages: Don Bradley’s The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Greg Kofford Books). Bradley’s research, drawing on a far wider range of early sources than previous treatments, reaches conclusions that significantly complicate the site’s narrative.

Among Bradley’s findings: the lost manuscript was likely considerably longer than 116 pages — possibly closer to 300 pages, based on Martin Harris’s statement that he scribed “near 200 pages” and the translation rate established by later witnesses. The Book of Lehi that was lost was a substantially richer, more complex record than usually assumed.

More significantly, Bradley’s research reveals that the Book of Lehi began with Passover — establishing a Jewish festival framework for the entire Nephite narrative. The founding narratives of Lehi and Nephi, as recoverable from early sources, parallel the Hebrew Bible’s account of Jewish exile with remarkable fidelity: reconstruction of kingdom, temple, dynasty, and sacred relics in a new promised land. The Nephite sacred relics (plates, interpreters, breastplate, Liahona) systematically mirror biblical Ark and priestly items in ways that reflect deep engagement with ancient Jewish temple theology, not nineteenth-century Protestant primitivism.

Bradley’s work suggests the Book of Mormon’s roots in ancient Jewish institutional frameworks are more pervasive than even faithful Latter-day Saint scholars had previously recognized. This is the opposite of what ldsdiscussions.com’s framework predicts: if Joseph Smith was a nineteenth-century author inventing ancient narrative, we would expect to find Protestant American conceptual frameworks; instead, the text increasingly reveals structures that were not part of his available cultural vocabulary.

IX. Evaluating the Cumulative Case

Ldsdiscussions.com concludes that when all the overview evidence is considered together, it becomes “inescapable” that the Book of Mormon is a nineteenth-century text. Strong language, and worth examining critically.

What the cumulative case actually shows is this: the evidence is consistent with the fraud hypothesis if one accepts several contestable starting assumptions. The manuscript was retained by hostile parties (uncertain). Joseph knew he couldn’t reproduce the text (assumed, not demonstrated). The small plates were invented after Moroni (a scholarly inference, not an established fact). The linguistic patterns prove single nineteenth-century authorship (disputed by early-modern-English research). Each link in the chain is presented as solid; collectively, the chain is supposed to be unbreakable.

But the same evidence is also consistent with the believing hypothesis: the manuscript was destroyed by Lucy Harris (supported by multiple independent witnesses). Joseph obeyed a divine command not to retranslate (the explicit content of D&C 10). The small plates were a providentially prepared substitute (attested by both Nephi and Mormon). The vagueness of the small plates reflects their self-declared spiritual rather than historical purpose.

Neither interpretation is “inescapable.” Both are possible. Honest intellectual engagement requires acknowledging this rather than asserting that one side’s reading of ambiguous evidence is beyond dispute.

What is clear is that the lost 116 pages incident is a genuinely significant episode in early church history — one that reveals the human dimensions of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling, the genuine spiritual crisis he experienced, and the providential theology that emerged from it. It is not an embarrassment to be minimized, but neither is it the open-and-shut case for fraud that ldsdiscussions.com presents.

Conclusion

The lost 116 pages episode confronts every serious student of the Book of Mormon with real questions: Why was the manuscript lost? Why was there no attempt to recover it? What does D&C 10 actually teach us about the event? How do the small plates fit into the overall narrative of the text?

Ldsdiscussions.com answers these questions with a framework that is internally coherent but depends on a series of assumptions it presents as established facts. The historical record on who took the pages is uncertain. The linguistic evidence cuts in multiple directions. The knowledge-progression argument proves too much if applied consistently. The theological logic of D&C 10 is more sophisticated than the site acknowledges, and the internal witnesses of the small plates’ “wise purpose” are a textual feature the fraud hypothesis must strain to explain.

Above all, the emerging scholarship of researchers like Don Bradley suggests the Book of Mormon’s connections to ancient Jewish institutional life are deeper and more specific than a nineteenth-century fabrication could plausibly account for. The picture is not of a nineteenth-century farm boy cleverly covering his tracks; it is of a text with ancient roots that continues to yield complex patterns under sustained scholarly scrutiny.

The lost 116 pages were a crisis — for Joseph Smith, for Martin Harris, and for the work they were engaged in. That they were also providentially prepared for, that a duplicate record waited in the plates Mormon had included “for a wise purpose he only partially understood,” remains one of the most remarkable features of the Book of Mormon’s coming forth. Those willing to sit with that complexity, rather than resolve it prematurely in either direction, will find the most honest engagement with the historical and textual evidence.

Sources and Further Reading

Don Bradley, The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories (Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019).

Richard Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005).

Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack, The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon, BYU Studies, 2018.

J.B. Haws, “The Lost 116 Pages Story: What We Do Know, What We Don’t Know, and What We Might Know,” in The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU Religious Studies Center, 2015).

FAIR Latter-day Saints, “Book of Mormon/Translation/The Lost 116 Pages,” fairlatterdaysaints.org.

Neal A. Maxwell, All These Things Shall Give Thee Experience (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1979).

“Did Lucy Harris Steal the 116 Pages?” From the Desk, fromthedesk.org.

Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, “Lost Manuscript of the Book of Mormon,” churchofjesuschrist.org/study/history/topics/lost-manuscript-of-the-book-of-mormon.