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For the last fifty pages of the Book of Mormon, there is a new narrator, Mormon's son Moroni. He is portrayed as a reluctant writer, the last survivor of his civilization. He is also the narrator with the clearest sense of his audience—readers living many centuries in the future. He appears to have given up on persuading them through the sorts of rational arguments about fulfilled prophecies employed by his father, and instead he hopes that his weakness in writing will be compensated for by God's revelation to readers. Moroni tells the story of the Jaredites, a people who predated the Nephites in the New World, and he emphasizes connections between their history and that of the Nephites. He also seems to have Christianized their account, for the regular references to Jesus are all in his editorial comments rather than in the narrative that he ostensibly paraphrased from Jaredite records.

Of the three major narrators, Moroni is the most likely to use phrases previously employed by other Book of Mormon writers. Actually, as he brings the book to an end, Moroni provides three separate conclusions. In the first he alludes to the words of Joseph of Egypt (as reported in the Nephite record), and then to Nephi's paraphrase of Joseph's words, and then to the writings of his father Mormon. The second conclusion, at Ether 12, offers a Nephite adaptation of Hebrews 11, somewhat anachronistically. And Moroni's final conclusion, the last chapter of the Book of Mormon, is a virtual curtain call which alludes to the farewell addresses of several of the earlier record keepers.

Joseph Smith was a young seeker in an age of religious awakening. He claimed he was visited by God and Christ in response to his spiritual quest for truth as a 14 year old, but his religious career began in earnest when he asserted he was the divinely appointed translator of sacred records delivered to him by an angel of God named Moroni seven years later. Assisted – in the face of growing opposition – by family, friends, and a well‐to‐do farmer, Martin Harris, Smith produced a translation from gold plates attested by 11 witnesses using Urim and Thummim (a seer stone and/or sacred “interpreters”). The concrete tangibility of the plates and accompanying holy relics, and the alleged historicity of the history he translated, made his claims especially audacious and resistant to dismissal as a subjective religious experience.

The Book of Mormon narrates how Lehi, a Jewish prophet, migrated to the Western Hemisphere with his clan and established a colony there, whose leaders maintained a history of their religious, political, and military history for the next thousand years. Eventually the followers of Christ, Nephites, were exterminated by their apostate brethren the Lamanites, while being led by Mormon and Moroni, great generals and final record keepers of the gold plates. The Book is structurally complex, and suffused with references to and teachings about Jesus Christ, even recording his visit to the Americas after his Jerusalem resurrection. Initial reception of the Book of Mormon was tepid.

The first chapter presents Mormonism’s apocalyptic master narrative from September 1823 with Joseph Smith’s first apocalyptic-themed apparition, to the organization of a theocratic legislature that would govern the world in the coming millennium. Over this twenty-year period, a robust vision of the last days took shape. This vision included the gathering of the righteous to safety before the coming of end times destructions, warfare in the United States (both among citizens and against invading armies), the establishment of the New Jerusalem in Missouri, and the return of Jesus Christ. The chapter also examines how Latter-day Saints who were not part of the hierarchy responded to this narrative and thereby contributed to the apocalyptic worldview.

This chapter documents how Latter-day Saints in the late 1840s and 1850s deployed the faith’s apocalyptic master narrative to make sense of the lands they colonized in the American West. Drawing on the apocalyptic geography of the Bible, Mormons came to believe they resided in the “wilderness” of the Book of Revelation where they would be protected from persecution. They recognized the region’s peaks as the mountain setting for Isaiah’s prophecies of a last days temple and an ensign to the nations. This chapter also examines how in the late nineteenth century Canada and Mexico would also be incorporated into the era’s apocalyptic geography.

Older Primary follows a four-year cycle linked to the LDS scriptural foundations of the Old Testament (Primary 6), New Testament (Primary 7), Book of Mormon (Primary 4, and Doctrine & Covenants (D&C) including the source known as Joseph Smith—History (Primary 5). The interpretive “key” to the LDS scriptures is Doctrine & Covenants (Primary 5), which fulfils this role for the correlated curriculum. The mythic structural interpretive analysis may be focused in five parts: the First Vision; the visits of the angel Moroni to Joseph Smith; the “translation” processes; the restoration of the priesthood and Church; the publication of the Book of Mormon in March of 1830, and the organization of the Church on April 5 of the same year.

This chapter introduces three of the main figures of the book, Joseph Smith Jr., Jane Manning James, and Wakara. It also introduces how these different Mormons conceptualized their relationship with God, and their relationship with other members of the Mormon people, especially members of different races. The founder of Mormonism, Smith believed that he was divinely mandated to create a religious movement that would end all divisions within the human family, including racial divisions. The Ute chief, Wakara, and his brother Arapeen believed that they were divinely called to share the lands of Utah with white settlers, but also called to fight against Mormon efforts to destroy the Ute way of life. An early black Mormon pioneer, James believed that she was divinely called to prove her Mormonness, which would help her shed her supposed black accursedness.

For years, scholars have identified elements of Hebraic poetry in the words of Book of Mormon prophets as evidence of the book’s ancient origins. This effort to make poetic forms proof of the book’s truth claims finds a parallel in the hundreds of poems that have been written about The Book of Mormon, a topic to which scholars have paid little attention. This essay shows how the logic behind Book of Mormon poetry runs counter to Lawrence Buell’s formulation of “American literary scripturism,” which argues that “the erosion of the Bible’s privileged status acted as a literary stimulus” for American writers. But poetry about The Book of Mormon does not rise from the ashes of a discredited sacred text. Rather, Latter-day Saint poets treat the book as generative of poetic genres such as epic and elegy, genres that provide their own commentary on The Book of Mormon and its relationship to US nationalism, indigenous peoples, and the nature of history in the Americas.

This chapter discusses Joseph Smith’s First Vision and his vision of the angel and the gold plates. Some historians have argued that he transformed his tale of treasure guarded by a ghost or spirit into a religious account of an ancient record delivered by the angel Moroni. Alan Taylor and others have contended, however, that treasure-seeking itself was rich with Christian symbols and that Joseph’s activities as a village seer led naturally to his role as a prophet. Lucy Mack Smith’s history gives the best account of Joseph’s life from 1820 to 1826. Affidavits from Howe’s Mormonism Unvailed are also included.

Joseph Knight and Josiah Stowell visited the Smith family on September 20, 1827. Two days later, Joseph and his wife, Emma Smith, rode in a wagon to the Hill Cumorah, and Joseph obtained the gold plates from the angel Moroni. William and Katharine Smith handled the plates but did not see them. According to Joseph, he also received other artifacts, including the Urim and Thummim, the Liahona, the brass plates, and the sword of Laban. Neighbor Lorenzo Saunders heard the story directly from Joseph Smith. Other neighbors ransacked Smith property searching for the plates. With the assistance of Martin Harris, Joseph and Emma arranged to move to Harmony, Pennsylvania.