I found the above talk by Don Bradley, author of the book: The Lost 116 Pages, in which he tries to explain his motives behind, and reasons for writing the book, and why he thinks it is important. I haven’t read the book, so I cannot comment on its contents. I am only commenting on what he has said in this talk. Skipping the initial introductory remarks, and starting at about 6:45 minutes into the video, he continues as follows:
“… I remember asking, we are missing part of the Book of Mormon? What was in it? Right, I mean, the Book of Mormon is so foundational to Latter-day Saint faith. So if you grow up a Latter-day Saint, like what do you hear more about than the Book of Mormon? Right? Like what is more foundational for you? And so the idea that part of it was gone, and nobody seemed to know what was in it, was what is strange to me. I think that whatever in life, whatever we experience over and over, becomes normal to us, we get used to it, right? So you look at different cultures around the world, and from our vantage point, sometimes their cultural practices might be really strange, right? But to people in those cultures, that people grown up with those cultures, it is not strange to them, right, because it is normal, this is something they have experienced repeatedly. So we have gotten used to it that the part of the Book of Mormon is missing, and so that has maybe ceased to be as weird to us as it should be.”
I would have to disagree. I can’t speak for him; but to me, it is not “weird” at all. In Doctrine and Covenants section 10, verses 38-46, it effectively explains that the Lord in his foreknowledge knew that those pages would be lost; therefore he instructed Nephi to prepare an alternative account of the pages that would be lost, that is actually more complete than those that were lost (see 1 Nephi 9:3-6; 19:3-4); so that in reality, nothing has been “lost” as a result. The designs and purposes of God cannot be “frustrated” (D&C 3:1-3). He is omniscient and omnipotent (Matthew 24:18; Revelation 19:6; 1 Nephi 9:5-6; Alma 26:35; Mosiah 3:5, 17-18, 21; 4:9; Ether 3:4; D&C 38:1-3; 61:1; 93:17; 100:1). He “knows the end from the beginning” (Abraham 2:8). He is able to ensure that his purposes are fulfilled, and his designs are accomplished. So in reality, we don’t have anything “missing” from the Book of Mormon that the Lord intended it to be there. Now this does not mean that the “lost pages” would not be important, valuable, or of interest to us if we had them; and therefore we should not look forward to a time when, in his wisdom, the Lord sees fit to reveal them to us again, as he has promised (D&C 10:37). But that is a separate issue from the assumption that something has somehow gone “missing” from the Book of Mormon that the Lord intended it to be there. The Lord has made it clear that that is not the case. God’s design and purpose was not thwarted by the loss of the translated pages. He then continues:
“And so my first motive behind this part of the ‘why?’ was just curiosity about what was in that lost text. As an adult, I added a new motive alongside curiosity about what was missing. In researching the Book of Mormon, studying the Book of Mormon, one of the things that I saw was that in Mormons abridgement, he would frequently allude back to earlier events, he would frequently allude back. It was like, I didn’t really see this till I read closely; but when I read closely, what I would see is that Mormon was developing certain themes across his narration; and that in order to understand what he is saying, let’s say at the end of Alma, you need the context of the other things that have happened in Alma. You need the context of what happened at the beginning of Alma … to understand the flow of a narrative—but also to understand how he is developing certain themes, how he is echoing things that he had said earlier. And it came to a kind of horrifying realization, because as I kept sort of chaining back things that Mormon said, I would go back earlier in his writings, and earlier to trace through the system of internal allusions, and echoes that he is creating; and then I got to this wall, the lost pages, right.”
It would have been more helpful if he had provided some quotations to support that assertion. In my own personal experience of reading the Book of Mormon, I have not observed such anachronisms as he describes. The whole of the Book of Mormon is an abridgement of much larger records, so the whole of it is likely to contain allusions to events not directly or in detail recorded in the book. That is to be expected. He then continues as follows:
“So we have all heard the lost pages referred to as the ‘book of Lehi,’ and with reason, because Joseph Smith used this term to refer to the text, and actually talk about the ‘why’ behind that in chapter 5 of the book. But because of that many of us have had the impression that the Book of Mormon lost pages were just a variant story of Lehi; it is just a more detailed version of Lehi’s narrative. Now it was a more detailed version of Lehi’s narrative, for sure; but the lost pages were told by Joseph Smith in the preface to 1830 Book of Mormon, and by section 10 of the Doctrine and Covenants, the lost pages were replaced by the Small Plates. The Small Plates cover the same time period as the lost pages. So the lost pages then, like the Small Plates, covered from Lehi and his exodus from Jerusalem down to the reign of King Benjamin, early reign of Benjamin. So when people have calculated the chronology for this, like the LDS Scriptures Committee, the people who did the Encyclopedia of Mormonism, and so on, they have calculated this development time period here to be about four hundred and fifty, four hundred and sixty years. So the ‘book of Lehi’ is a really long time; it is more than just a missing story of Lehi. In fact, I eventually came to realize just what proportion of Mormon’s abridgement this is, right. So the Book of Mormon says it starts 600 years before Christ, with Lehi in Jerusalem. Then you know Lehi’s calendar restarted with the birth of Christ, and then you know there is Christ’s coming; and 200 years of peace, and so on. So at the end of 4 Nephi, the last record keeper before Mormon, a record keeper named Ammon, writes his final things on the record, and then he buries the record in a hill, and he leaves it for a successor. And so he tells Mormon, when Mormon is about 10 years old, someday I am going to go and bury this record, and you are going to create a record of your own life. So this tells us Mormon’s abridgement, right? So one is an abridgment of everybody up before him, from Lehi all the way through. Then Mormon picks up with not an abridgment, but a first-person account of what happened in his lifetime. So how long is the period of Mormons abridgement? With the 600 years from Lehi to the birth of Christ, and then the 320 years from the birth of Christ to the time of Ammon buries the plate: 600 plus 320 … it is nine hundred twenty years. So how long was it that I mentioned that people have calculated the missing part of Mormon’s abridgement to be? It is the first 450 or 460 years. 920 divided by two is 460. We are literally missing the first half of Mormon’s abridgement, the first half, so this is fascinating. It is a little kind of appalling, like works out how can we understand this text, when we are missing so much of it, right? Like, so your challenge tonight is to take any one of these books sitting by you that you have never read before, right, rip out the first half (I think I would have to pay for it first!), rip out the first half, okay, and then have somebody else give you a thumbnail sketch of that first half, and then you read the second half, and see how much sense does it make—not having the first half. That is the situation we are in with Mormon’s abridgement.”
Not quite! I wouldn’t agree, for the reason explained above. The Small Plates that Nephi added as a substitute for the “lost pages,” is actually more complete, and contains a more detailed account of what the Lord intended to be included in the Book of Mormon (which has more to do with teachings and doctrine, rather than mere historical narrative, see 1 Nephi 9:3-6; 19:3-4; D&C 10:45-49), than the book of Lehi did. He continues:
“That is why I did this project, right? That was the thing that was motivating me. I wanted to know what was in the lost pages of Mormons abridgement, so I could understand what was in the part of Mormon’s abridgement we still had. So that took it from just curiosity, right, curiosity about what was lost, was now combined with really wanting to understand what we still have.”
Like I said, I have not read his book, so I cannot comment on its contents. It is quite possible that it contains interesting material that is worth reading. So my aim here is not to discredit his book. I am only expressing my views on the justification he has given for composing it. But if it genuinely contains original material that is informative and interesting, then it is a good book, and worth a read.
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