Book Of Mormon

Book of Mormon

The official name of the Mormon Church isn’t, well, the Mormon Church.  Rather, it’s the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.  Why Mormon, then?  (I mean, seeing as Mormon doesn’t even show up in the official name.)  The nickname’s taken from the most famous Mormon book of scripture, the Book of Mormon.  And many people don’t know much more about the Book of Mormon, other than Mormons must be reading it.  So let’s say a little about it.  To be quick and basic, the book stands as another testament of Christ.  It’s a record of America’s ancient, Christian inhabitants—and of Christ’s dealings with them.  Inside it is the fullness of the gospel of Christ.  The book is a companion to the Bible—it clarifies doctrines and unfolds truths partly lost.

And, like the Bible, it isn’t the work of one person, but is compiled from many records, kept by the American prophets over hundreds of years.  Mormon is not the writer of the book, but its abridger.  From these many, many records, he took the most important pieces to make what we have today.

The Book of Mormon describes the civilizations of two groups.  The main group, which would quickly split into two groups (the Nephites and Lamanites), came from Jerusalem in 600 BC.  The less-known group came far earlier.  We’re not, actually, entirely sure when they came.  They were called the Jaredites.

After the Tower of Babel, these Jaredites were guided to America by the hand of the Lord.  Their language had been preserved, because they were originally a very righteous people, but their history didn’t end up being a happy one at all.  Eventually, they split up into violent factions and destroyed their own people completely, little by little.  Later, explorers from the Nephites would run across Jaredite lands and call them a “land of bones.”

The Book of Mormon is mostly the Nephites’ story.  All of the writers of the book were Nephites (save for Ether, a Jaredite, who recorded the story of his own people).  These Nephites wrote about many subjects, from the coming of Christ, to the danger of sin—and selfishness.  The first concern of the book is in recording doctrine, but it has some historical elements as well.  The wars the Nephites had with the Lamanites are often described.  Once, the Nephites and the Lamanites were the same people, but “because of the traditions of their fathers,” the Lamanites had come to hate the Nephites with a murderous strength.  The wars of the Nephites were mostly defensive, though, and their hope was always that their enemies might be converted and saved.

The Book of Mormon has another focus: something Mormons often call the “pride cycle.”  The Nephites weren’t always a righteous people—but when they obeyed the Lord’s commandments, He made them prosper.  Prosperity would eventually become a point of pride for some Nephites and these would decide that they were better than the poorer people.  Their pride and arrogance would grow.  The prosperous would ignore the prophets and the commandments until the whole nation would end up wicked.  The Lord would then chasten the nation with famine or war—the people would be humbled and start to obey again.  The cycle started over. 

The Book of Mormon doesn’t include the records of the Lamanites, but they also had cycles.  Lamanites who converted did so with a powerful passion.  One group of converted Lamanites put away all their weapons and refused to take them up again, even when their own people came to kill them.  They had promised the Lord that they would never kill again and would rather die than break their promise.  Their children didn’t make this promise—these fought alongside the Nephites in the next series of wars.  Their faith was so great that they couldn’t be killed.

After His resurrection, Christ visited the Nephites and Lamanites.  Among them, He established His Church.  After He left, the Nephites and Lamanites still lived in a golden age of peace for several generations.  But with every generation, the people remember Christ less, and the peace eventually broke.  The people broke, at that, back into factions and turned back to their old wartime habits.  Four centuries after Christ, the Nephites no longer even kept to the pride cycle—they’d become both aggressive and despairing and, although their civilization was falling apart, they refused to repent.  The Lamanites destroyed them.  In Mormon beliefs, the ancestors of the American natives are the Lamanites. 

Mormon, the book’s abridger, was slain in one of the last battles.  His son, Moroni, wrote a short record at the very end of the book, then hid it.  As an angel, Moroni appeared to Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, and told him about the Nephite record, written on golden plates.  Joseph Smith would translate it into English and publish it.