Mormon Mystery

The huge and prosperous empire of Mormonism is all built upon a single rock: the claim that Joseph Smith Jr. was a prophet of God who miraculously discovered and translated long-lost holy scriptures. Ever since the Book of Mormon was published in 1830 it has been embraced by his Latter-Day Saints (current worldwide membership: 3.8 million) and scoffed at by outsiders. Now four California researchers, relying on the sometimes shaky science of handwriting analysis, say they have evidence that the book is a hoax.

Smith, a youthful farmhand, reported that an angel named Moroni had showed him some golden tablets that had been buried near Palmyra, N.Y. The tablets were in an unknown language, "reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics," and Smith could read them only by peering through two miraculous stones* that the angel gave him. The 522-page Book of Mormon declares that the New World's Indians were actually Jews who sailed from the Near East in the 6th century B.C., and that they were later visited by Jesus Christ after his resurrection.

In about three months' time, Smith dictated his translation in a quasi-King James English to various scribes, who never saw the golden tablets during the process. Three "witnesses," however, wrote a testimony that they were shown the tablets by an angel, and eight added that they had handled them. The angel Moroni, it was said, eventually carried the tablets off to heaven.

Smith stored his manuscript in the cornerstone of a house in Nauvoo, Ill. Three years later, in 1844, he was murdered by a mob. The house was torn down in 1882 and the manuscript scattered, but a few sections were recovered and placed in the church's Salt Lake City archives. Among them is one 20-page fragment of which twelve pages were written by a single, but unknown, hand.

Howard Davis, 33, and three other freelance researchers, one of them distantly related to a Smith scribe, now say they have proved that the unattributed twelve pages were actually pilfered from a manuscript by Solomon Spalding, a Congregational minister and sometime novelist who died in 1816.

Spalding is not a new name in disputes over Mormonism. As early as 1833 one apostate Mormon argued that there were similarities between Smith's scriptures and an unpublished Spalding novel about the origins of the Indians. The missing Spalding manuscript was supposedly filched from a Pittsburgh publishing house by an itinerant preacher who gave the papers to Smith.

To test the authenticity of Smith's manuscript for a book they are preparing, the researchers gave photocopies of sample pages from the Mormon archives and known specimens of Spalding's writing to three handwriting experts: Henry Silver, William Kaye and Howard Doulder. All three have broad credentials for such work (though Silver and Kaye reached opposite conclusions about whether Howard Hughes wrote the so-called Mormon will). Working independently and not knowing about any tie to the Book of Mormon, all three decided that the same man had written both sets of documents.

Unknown Scribe. On the Mormon side, the church's historian, Leonard Arrington, responded that the new attack on the Book of Mormon meant "absolutely nothing." The writing of the unknown scribe, he said, "follows on the same page and precedes on another page material written" by others. How, he asked, could twelve pages written by Spalding match the paper of pages that precede and follow them?

Even if Smith used Spalding's manuscript, why would Smith have been so foolish as to retain pages of a known manuscript within a work he said was inspired by God? Davis & Co. answer --somewhat lamely--that Smith was so poverty-stricken that he and his aides might have stuck sections of Spalding's manuscript between pages of their own in order to save paper, which was scarce and expensive in those days.

Officially the Mormon Church remains unruffled. It is welcoming the researchers and handwriting experts to Salt Lake City to study the original documents. Said a spokesman: "We still declare that the Book of Mormon is precisely what we have always said it was--a divinely revealed scripture of ancient American people."

* Detractors of Mormons make much of records showing that the year before he started his book, Smith was convicted for hiring himself out to locate buried treasure by use of a magic "seer stone."

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