The lost 116 pages and the small-plates solution

When the first manuscript vanished, Joseph did not reproduce it; a revelation supplied a second set of plates covering the same period, dictated last.

What the Church claims

God foresaw the loss of the Book of Lehi and had Nephi prepare a second record 2,400 years earlier; evil men altered the stolen pages, so Joseph was forbidden to retranslate.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Contested. The small-plates provision reads more naturally as a recovery from a disaster than as a preparation for one: nothing before the loss points forward to it, and the instruction not to retranslate removed the one test that would have settled the matter. But foreknowledge is not a claim evidence can close, and the small plates are in the text. Contested, and likely to stay so.

The record

  • D&C 10 says Satan put it into the thieves' hearts 'to alter the words', so that a retranslation would appear to contradict itself; Joseph is told not to retranslate and to use the plates of Nephi instead.
  • The Church's current heading dates D&C 10 'likely around April 1829, though portions may have been received as early as the summer of 1828'.
  • After the loss, dictation resumed at Mosiah and ran to Moroni, and 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon was dictated last. The evidence includes scribal hands, the wherefore/therefore shift and the title page; Bushman, Welch, Skousen and Gardner accept this order.
  • Authors in Mosiah and Alma appear unaware of doctrines and prophecies found in the small plates; Alma says of Christ's coming 'we know not how soon' although Nephi had given a 600-year figure.
  • Don Bradley (2019) argues the lost manuscript was far longer than 116 pages, closer to 300, and reconstructs its contents from late reminiscences; a believing reviewer in 2025 called the length estimates 'highly speculative'.

The moving target

  • 1829: Wicked men altered the manuscript; do not retranslate; translate the plates of Nephi.
  • current edition: Dates the revelation to about April 1829, with portions possibly from summer 1828.

The exchange

Alan Goff (FARMS Review 2004); John Welch; Scripture Central

The small plates are foreshadowed inside the text (1 Nephi 9; Words of Mormon) 'for a wise purpose', which is evidence of divine foresight. Dictating them last is irrelevant to their antiquity, and composing 1-2 Nephi last would have required Joseph to track hundreds of earlier allusions.

The answer: The passages that foreshadow the replacement were themselves dictated after the loss, so they cannot count as foresight. The stated reason for not retranslating makes little sense: an altered manuscript in a different hand, on the original paper, would expose the forgers, not Joseph. What it does protect against is a second dictation failing to match the first, which is the risk only a composer faces. And the replacement behaves like a later layer: Mosiah-Alma do not know what the small plates say, while the small plates contain the most developed Christology in the book.

What they get right: Goff is right that Mosiah-first dictation is accepted by believing scholars and does not by itself prove authorship. Roesler offers an in-narrative explanation for the later authors' ignorance.

Don Bradley; Jeff Lindsay; Interpreter reviewers

Bradley's reconstruction shows the lost text was rich, coherent and consistent with the published book, including temple and priesthood themes, which a fraud would have had no reason to build.

The answer: The reconstruction leans on reminiscences recorded decades later and on inference from the surviving text, so consistency with the surviving text is built in. A believing reviewer doubts the length arithmetic. It is an ingenious book, but it cannot be evidence for antiquity.

What they get right: Bradley's work is careful history and both sides cite it; he is right that '116' is simply the page count of the replacement in the printer's manuscript.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The episode looks like the fingerprint of composition. A translator with plates and a divine instrument could reproduce a lost passage; an author could not. The revelation's rationale protects against exactly the author's risk. The replacement text was produced last, is announced by bridging passages also produced last, and carries theology that the 'later' books written earlier do not know. Brent Metcalfe's 1993 'Priority of Mosiah' essay made this case, and the dictation order it depends on is now conceded by leading LDS scholars.

The apologetic case

Words of Mormon and 1 Nephi 9 are integral to the text, not clumsy patches; the small plates differ in genre, voice and sourcing in ways that fit a separate first-person record; and Joseph's refusal to retranslate, which invited ridicule, is an odd choice for a confident fraud who could simply have dictated a loose paraphrase and blamed the scribes for differences.

What would change this

Recovery of the lost manuscript showing close agreement with the small-plates narrative in details Joseph could not have remembered.

Sources

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