How did the Book of Mormon happen?
This is a question no reader of the book with even a modicum of appreciation for its monumentality can help but ask. Its sheer length (over five hundred dense manuscript pages), plus the velocity of its composition (the bulk of it was transcribed in about three months), plus its unconventional compositional method (dictated by Joseph Smith to a small cadre of rotating scribes), plus its staggering narrative complexity (centuries of history of an ancient people relayed by multiple narrators in both first and third person through a vast array of embedded texts) distinguish the Book of Mormon from virtually every other major narrative work of the nineteenth century.
Answers, of course, abound.
Orthodox accounts have cleaved to Smith's own claim that the book is an authentic collection of ancient texts he translated with the aid of divine instruments, perhaps with some measure of...
