The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ

Throughout The Book of Mormon, reference is made to the “sacred records,” which are usually identified as the Plates of Nephi (though other, more minor records, also appear in the texts). The Plates of Nephi thus form a motif that carries through from one end of The Book of Mormon to the other, from the initial description of Nephi’s record-keeping in the sixth century BCE to the burying of the plates by Mormon and his son Moroni in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. As regards the Plates of Nephi, two sets are indicated by the text: the Small Plates and the Large Plates. The Small Plates record the early history of the Nephites, from 1 Nephi through the Book of Omni. According to Joseph Smith’s account of the text’s creation, these were intended as a complementary account to the Large Plates, but became the primary source material for the opening books of The Book of Mormon after Smith’s original translation of the first section of the Large Plates was lost (see the Authorial Context entry in the Background section above). The Large Plates contain the entire arc of Nephite history, being continuously maintained by record-keepers until the fourth century CE, at which time the prophet Mormon produces an abridgement of them on gold plates. These gold plates of Mormon are the initial source text revealed to Joseph Smith in the 1820s. Other accounts, such as the contributions of Moroni, are added to the sacred records just before their final burial at the Hill Cumorah.

As a literary motif, the sacred records function in at least two ways. First, they underscore the theme of God’s plan of salvation through history. The records—and, more specifically, the way the records pass down a line of guardianship throughout history, always pointing forward to the fulfillment of God’s design—reminds the reader of God’s sovereignty over history. The description of the records from the end of 4 Nephi is typical of this aspect: “yea, even all the sacred records which had been handed down from generation to generation, which were sacred” (4 Nephi 1:48). The records’ self-referential nature also serves to draw the reader’s attention to the collection’s parallels with the Bible, which consists of a series of collected texts that at times exhibit a self-referential awareness as a single corpus of sacred books.

Second, the motif of the sacred records serves to offer support on questions of the manuscripts’ provenance that Joseph Smith would face upon the texts’ publication. Many of the references to the sacred records in The Book of Mormon have been noted by critical scholars as appearing to answer questions that Joseph Smith would later face about the reliability of The Book of Mormon, essentially creating a line of textual provenance, transmission, and preservation. This is the case, for instance, regarding the question of why the Small Plates of Nephi were available to be substituted for the lost translation from the Large Plates, a question addressed by the prophet Mormon himself: He recounts that he preserved the Small Plates because the Spirit of the Lord whispered “a wise purpose” to him for which they would someday be intended (Words of Mormon 1:7).