Lars Nielsen's "How the Book of Mormon Came to Pass"

[Failed Prophecy]

The more I think of his trigger warning, the more irked I get. “Let me cook up something to make it look challenging to people’s faith, and then warn them that it inevitably will be.”

He has repeated variations of that in interviews. When I heard it I thought it at best impolitic, at worst delusional. However, I did leave room for the possibility that he could deliver the proof. It seems that my initial impression was, sadly, correct.

I don't want to go ad hominem on the guy, but it does seem more and more that Lars mostly has made a name for himself on the fact that his brother had inside information at Ensign Peak, which Lars was happy to use.

[Kishkumen]

He has repeated variations of that in interviews. When I heard it I thought it at best impolitic, at worst delusional. However, I did leave room for the possibility that he could deliver the proof. It seems that my initial impression was, sadly, correct.

I don't want to go ad hominem on the guy, but it does seem more and more that Lars mostly has made a name for himself on the fact that his brother had inside information at Ensign Peak, which Lars was happy to use.

I don’t see how he burnishes his credentials through this book.

[Dr. Shades]

Nielson has built his entire theory on the Spalding - Rigdon connection, which has been so thoroughly debunked that I can't personally get past anything else.

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

[Physics Guy]

Imagine you’ve grown up with The Lord of the Rings, and then someone tells you it was all made up. Sure, there was Sauron, they say; and yeah, he was defeated and all the orcs disappeared. There were no hobbits, though, and no rangers or riders or Nazgûl. There was no Gandalf and there was no Ring.

So you ask them, what happened with Sauron? They just shrug. “Could have been any of a lot of things and we’ll never know the details. Things just didn’t work out for Sauron and his orcs.”

That’s hard to accept, even if it’s in some ways more reasonable than the Ring saga, because it’s just so much less of a story. It turns the Downfall of the Lord of the Rings into something that happened offstage.

Even if you have to admit that the whole Ring thing always did seem kind of suss, it was quite a story. You could hold it in your mind and run through it. “Sauron, yada yada yada, no Sauron” simply doesn’t compete. It’s not an alternative story. It’s a refusal to tell you a story.

So you’re going to want to cook up an alternative story. No Gandalf, no Ring: Sauron must have been overthrown by King Arthur, leading a squadron of time-traveling tanks. It’s crazy, but it’s a story.

[Kishkumen]

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

The only problem with it is a lack of evidence supporting it.

[Kishkumen]

Imagine you’ve grown up with The Lord of the Rings, and then someone tells you it was all made up. Sure, there was Sauron, they say; and yeah, he was defeated and all the orcs disappeared. There were no hobbits, though, and no rangers or riders or Nazgûl. There was no Gandalf and there was no Ring.

So you ask them, what happened with Sauron? They just shrug. “Could have been any of a lot of things and we’ll never know the details. Things just didn’t work out for Sauron and his orcs.”

That’s hard to accept, even if it’s in some ways more reasonable than the Ring saga, because it’s just so much less of a story. It turns the Downfall of the Lord of the Rings into something that happened offstage.

Even if you have to admit that the whole Ring thing always did seem kind of suss, it was quite a story. You could hold it in your mind and run through it. “Sauron, yada yada yada, no Sauron” simply doesn’t compete. It’s not an alternative story. It’s a refusal to tell you a story.

So you’re going to want to cook up an alternative story. No Gandalf, no Ring: Sauron must have been overthrown by King Arthur, leading a squadron of time-traveling tanks. It’s crazy, but it’s a story.

That sounds like a mash up of the Book of Mormon and the Scientology mythos.

[Physics Guy]

I just mean that the reasonable non-Mormon doesn't have any particular story about how the Book of Mormon got made. Smith wrote it, or maybe he had help; maybe he used stuff he had read in books, or maybe he heard it or just made it up; maybe he had some fake plates made of lead shingles or maybe just bricks in a box, or maybe it was all just bamboozling witnesses who maybe even never knew that their names were being printed as witnesses. It's the kind of thing that could obviously have happened in lots of ways, somehow. Quite possibly one or two weird flukes were involved; flukes do happen. Since the only people who knew exactly what happened had obvious reasons to hide the details, we can't expect to find any clear evidence, now, anyway.

Most non-Mormons don't need any story about the Book of Mormon. We don't find it all weird to just shrug and say that Smith and/or accomplices cooked it up somehow, whatever. For Mormons, in contrast, the "coming forth" of the Book is a long and complicated story that's all very important. And so I think it may be easier for an ex-Mormon to change from the detailed Mormon story to a new detailed story than to change to the non-Mormon's shrugging absence of story. Even after you've stopped believing in the plates and the angel, you probably still feel a sort of narrative void that needs to be filled.

This is my theory, anyway, for why quite a few ex-Mormons seem to become enthusiastic, beyond what seems to non-Mormons to be warranted by the available evidence, about specific revisionist explanations for how the Mormon scriptures got written.

[Craig Paxton]

Nielson has built his entire theory on the Spalding - Rigdon connection, which has been so thoroughly debunked that I can't personally get past anything else.

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

Why because you believe that Smith couldn't have dictated the book himself? Clearly the most logical and yes valid explanation for the book is that it was a product of Smith's own mind. There is nothing miraculous about the Book of Mormon, it's stories were cobbled together from the Bible and Smith's own milieu.

Smith went to great lengths to perpetrate his deception, weaving elaborate tales involving gold plates, angels, and dire consequences for those who questioned his claims. His success was largely due to the prevailing superstitions of his time. However, in today's more skeptical climate, such a fanciful fabrication would be dismissed outright as BS.

[Dr. Shades]

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

The only problem with it is a lack of evidence supporting it.

The mountain of evidence contained in Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? The Spalding Enigma doesn't seem like much of a "lack" to me. Scroll down and read the first and second reviews for more information.

No, the Spalding-Rigdon connection hasn’t been debunked. Just because the Mopologists have declared it so doesn’t mean they’re correct.

It remains the most valid explanation for the origin of the Book of Mormon.

Why because you believe that Smith couldn't have dictated the book himself?

No, because I believe Spalding's friends and neighbors who recognized the Book of Mormon as the same book Spalding was working on before he moved to Pittsburgh. One of them even recognized, and pointed out, a specific error in I Nephi that he suggested that Spalding fix, which Spalding agreed was erroneous and said he'd fix, but showed up in the Book of Mormon anyway. As above, see Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon? The Spalding Enigma. Scroll down and read the reviews for more specifics.

[Kishkumen]

I’ve read that book, Shades. Somehow I did not come out of it as convinced as you. As I have argued here before, the Book of Mormon bears a generic and rough narrative resemblance to Manuscript Found, as its language resembles the Late War, but it is its own, unique work. What the evidence supports is the Book of Mormon being a product of its time and place in history. The Dartmouth business is interesting for precisely this reason—it shows quite well what the Zeitgeist was. It does not explain the Book of Mormon so much as contextualize it beautifully. Spalding comes out of the same environment. He did not write the Book of Mormon. He wrote its cousins.