How Complex Is the Book of Mormon? Flashbacks, Prophecies, and One Draft

Critics like to say a 23-year-old farmer made the Book of Mormon up. Okay. Then let’s look at what he would have had to keep straight. This isn’t a simple story told from start to finish. It’s a layered record with several narrators, nested flashbacks, prophecies that get fulfilled hundreds of pages later, and an internal map that never contradicts itself. And it was dictated in one draft, mostly out of order, with no notes. Read it and decide for yourself whether “he made it up” really explains it.

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Three peoples, a thousand years, and two sets of plates

The Book of Mormon follows three different peoples. Lehi’s family leaves Jerusalem “in the commencement of the first year of the reign of Zedekiah” (1 Nephi 1:4). A second group, the people of Zarahemla, “came out from Jerusalem at the time that Zedekiah, king of Judah, was carried away captive into Babylon” (Omni 1:15). And the Jaredites go back much further, to “the great tower, at the time the Lord confounded the language of the people” (Ether 1:33).

Then the book keeps its own clock. Nephi records the prophecy that the Messiah would come “six hundred years from the time that my father left Jerusalem” (1 Nephi 10:4). Hundreds of pages later, the narrator marks the moment: “it was six hundred years from the time that Lehi left Jerusalem” (3 Nephi 1:1). Moroni closes the record “more than four hundred and twenty years” after the sign of Christ’s birth (Moroni 10:1). That’s roughly a thousand years of Nephite history, with the Jaredite story layered underneath it.

Two sets of plates, and an editor who tells you so

On top of the timeline, the book is built from different records. There are the small plates of Nephi, focused on spiritual things, and the large plates, the fuller history that Mormon abridged. Mormon explains exactly how he stitched them together:

And now, I speak somewhat concerning that which I have written; for after I had made an abridgment from the plates of Nephi, down to the reign of this king Benjamin, of whom Amaleki spake, I searched among the records which had been delivered into my hands, and I found these plates, which contained this small account of the prophets, from Jacob down to the reign of this king Benjamin, and also many of the words of Nephi.

Words of Mormon 1:3

Two records cover the same period, they meet at King Benjamin, and they don’t contradict each other. (I go deeper on what the text itself shows in Is the Book of Mormon an Ancient Document?)

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Flashbacks inside flashbacks

Here’s one of my favorite examples. In Mosiah 7, King Mosiah sends a search party to find out what happened to a group that went back to the land of Lehi-Nephi, because “his people had heard nothing from them” (Mosiah 7:1). The searchers find King Limhi and his people in bondage. Then the book jumps back two generations and hands you the group’s own record, in the first person:

I, Zeniff, having been taught in all the language of the Nephites, and having had a knowledge of the land of Nephi, or of the land of our fathers’ first inheritance, and having been sent as a spy among the Lamanites that I might spy out their forces, that our army might come upon them and destroy them—but when I saw that which was good among them I was desirous that they should not be destroyed.

Mosiah 9:1

Inside that flashback is another thread. A young priest named Alma believes Abinadi and pleads for his life (Mosiah 17:2), flees, and baptizes believers at “a place which was called Mormon” (Mosiah 18:4). His people go into bondage of their own, escape, and finally arrive in Zarahemla, where “king Mosiah did also receive them with joy” (Mosiah 24:25). By Mosiah 25, three separate storylines have caught up to the present and merged.

A loose end that gets tied off at the very end

Limhi’s people also found something on an earlier expedition: “twenty-four plates which are filled with engravings, and they are of pure gold” (Mosiah 8:9). King Mosiah translates them (Mosiah 28:11). Where’s that record? It shows up hundreds of pages later as the book of Ether, Moroni’s abridgment of those same plates. A thread dropped in Mosiah gets picked up near the end of the book.

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Prophecies fulfilled hundreds of pages later

The Book of Mormon doesn’t just tell you prophecies were fulfilled. It gives you the prophecy, moves on, and then shows the fulfillment later in matching words. Abinadi tells King Noah’s people they “shall be smitten on the cheek,” have “burdens lashed upon their backs,” and “be driven before like a dumb ass” (Mosiah 12:2, 5). Nine chapters later:

Now they durst not slay them, because of the oath which their king had made unto Limhi; but they would smite them on their cheeks, and exercise authority over them; and began to put heavy burdens upon their backs, and drive them as they would a dumb ass—

Mosiah 21:3

Abinadi also says “the life of king Noah shall be valued even as a garment in a hot furnace” (Mosiah 12:3). Noah’s own men later cause “that he should suffer, even unto death by fire” (Mosiah 19:20).

Samuel the Lamanite and the signs of Christ

And behold, this will I give unto you for a sign at the time of his coming; for behold, there shall be great lights in heaven, insomuch that in the night before he cometh there shall be no darkness, insomuch that it shall appear unto man as if it was day.

Helaman 14:3

Samuel adds that “there shall a new star arise” (Helaman 14:5) and that at Christ’s death there would be no light “for the space of three days” (Helaman 14:20). Turn to 3 Nephi: “at the going down of the sun there was no darkness” (3 Nephi 1:15), “a new star did appear, according to the word” (3 Nephi 1:21), and later the darkness lasts “for the space of three days” (3 Nephi 8:23).

Nephi saw the same destruction centuries earlier: “a mist of darkness on the face of the land of promise,” with lightnings, earthquakes, and cities sunk and burned (1 Nephi 12:4). He also quotes Zenos on “three days of darkness” and a “vapor of darkness” (1 Nephi 19:10–11). In 3 Nephi the survivors “could feel the vapor of darkness” (3 Nephi 8:20). Hold onto that one, because it matters even more when you see the order these chapters were dictated in.

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Storylines that split and come back together

Alma 17 opens with Alma running into the sons of Mosiah on the road (Alma 17:1). Then the narrative rewinds: they “had been teaching the word of God for the space of fourteen years among the Lamanites” (Alma 17:4), and the next ten chapters tell that story, including Ammon and King Lamoni, before the two threads meet again.

The war chapters do the same thing on a bigger scale. Alma 43–62 tracks several fronts at once. Captain Moroni works in one region, Helaman leads his young warriors in another, and the book includes letters between commanders and the government. One army’s situation gets explained in another commander’s letter, and the details line up. Any novelist will tell you that kind of cross-referencing is hard to keep straight even with notes.

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A map that never contradicts itself

The book never gives you a map, but it gives you a lot of directions, and they agree with each other. Here’s Mormon describing the narrow neck between the land northward and the land southward:

And now, it was only the distance of a day and a half’s journey for a Nephite, on the line Bountiful and the land Desolation, from the east to the west sea; and thus the land of Nephi and the land of Zarahemla were nearly surrounded by water, there being a small neck of land between the land northward and the land southward.

Alma 22:32

Forty-one chapters later, Hagoth builds a ship “on the borders of the land Bountiful, by the land Desolation,” and launches it “into the west sea, by the narrow neck which led into the land northward” (Alma 63:5). Same places, same relationships, no contradiction. Mormon even explains the name Desolation: it bordered the land “which had been peopled and been destroyed, of whose bones we have spoken” (Alma 22:30), meaning the Jaredite lands.

Historian Brian Hales counts the scale of it: the text keeps track of “more than 425 geographical relationships of over 175 individuals and groups who existed in at least 125 different topographical locations,” citing John Sorenson’s source book (Hales, BYU Studies). You don’t need to settle where it all happened to see that it’s internally consistent. I’m cautious about anyone who claims they’ve nailed the map. The consistency is the point. (More on the debate at galatians18.app.)

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Names that fit their people

Names in the Book of Mormon follow their people. Jaredite names like Coriantumr, Shiz, and Moron have their own feel, separate from Nephite names like Nephi, Mosiah, and Helaman. Lamanite kings have names like Lamoni (Alma 17:21). And some names cross over in ways that make sense. The last Jaredite, Coriantumr, “was discovered by the people of Zarahemla; and he dwelt with them for the space of nine moons” (Omni 1:21). Centuries later, a Nephite dissenter named Coriantumr shows up, “a descendant of Zarahemla” (Helaman 1:15). The family that met the old Jaredite king carried the name down.

Even Mormon’s own name has a backstory he takes the time to explain:

And behold, I am called Mormon, being called after the land of Mormon, the land in which Alma did establish the church among the people, yea, the first church which was established among them after their transgression.

3 Nephi 5:12

That ties straight back to the waters of Mormon in Mosiah 18, written hundreds of pages earlier. Politics show up in the names too. Amalickiah wasn’t a Lamanite at all. He was a Nephite dissenter (Alma 46:3) who went over to the Lamanites and took their throne by fraud (Alma 47:35). (More on the names at galatians18.app.)

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Different voices, and an editor you can see

The book opens in the first person: “I, Nephi, having been born of goodly parents” (1 Nephi 1:1). Most of the middle is Mormon’s third-person abridgment, and you can watch him step in to draw the lesson: “And thus we see how merciful and just are all the dealings of the Lord” (Alma 50:19). Inside his abridgment, other first-person records like Zeniff’s are quoted whole. Then the voice changes again: “Behold I, Moroni, do finish the record of my father, Mormon” (Mormon 8:1).

Those shifts aren’t random. Each narrator has his own concerns and his own way of talking. Statistical wordprint studies have even found distinct writing patterns for different Book of Mormon authors, and none that match Joseph Smith or the usual suspects (see The Berkeley Wordprint Test).

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Laws, money, and secret combinations

The book describes working systems, not just scenery. King Mosiah ends the monarchy and sets up judges chosen by the people:

Now it is not common that the voice of the people desireth anything contrary to that which is right; but it is common for the lesser part of the people to desire that which is not right; therefore this shall ye observe and make it your law—to do your business by the voice of the people.

Mosiah 29:26

Alma 11 lays out a system of weights and measures in gold and silver, the senine, seon, shum, and limnah, and notes the Nephites “did not reckon after the manner of the Jews who were at Jerusalem” (Alma 11:4–5). Notice it never calls them coins. It’s a measuring system tied to the judges’ pay.

There are secret combinations with “their secret signs, and their secret words” (Helaman 6:22), led by Gadianton, who was “exceedingly expert in many words” (Helaman 2:4). And there are military details, like Captain Moroni building “ridges of earth” topped with “works of timbers built up to the height of a man” and a frame of pickets (Alma 50:1–3). These systems show up in one place and then keep working consistently in the chapters that follow.

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Dictated out of order, in one draft

Now here’s what makes all of that so hard to explain away. After the first 116 pages were lost in 1828, the translation picked back up in Mosiah, not 1 Nephi. John W. Welch, who reconstructed the timeline from the historical documents, says there is “a strong consensus” that it “resumed where the lost pages had left off, with the book of Mosiah.” The small plates, 1 Nephi through Words of Mormon, were dictated last, in June 1829 (Welch, BYU Studies). (More on the lost pages at galatians18.app.)

Welch walks through what that order means:

• Alma 36:22 quotes “exactly twenty-two words from Lehi as found in 1 Nephi 1:8.” Alma was dictated around April 24. The Lehi text it quotes wasn’t dictated until June. (Compare Alma 36:22 and 1 Nephi 1:8. More in Alma 36, Built as a Mirror.)
• 3 Nephi 8, the destruction, was dictated about May 12. The prophecies it fulfills in 1 Nephi 19 were dictated “a month later.”
• The Jaredite genealogy in Ether 1 lists thirty names from Ether back to Jared in one day’s dictation. Then over the next three days, in Ether 2–11, they came out “in exactly the opposite order,” apparently without notes.
• The seven tribes (Nephites, Jacobites, Josephites, Zoramites, Lamanites, Lemuelites, and Ishmaelites) appear in the same order in 4 Nephi 1:37–38 and Mormon 1:8, and then weeks later in Jacob 1:13.

And how long did it take? Welch counts about 85 days from April 7 to the end of June 1829, and after subtracting travel, interruptions, and other work, “only 57 to 63 available full-time working days.” Royal Skousen estimates the original text at 269,510 words. Skousen also found “very few signs of any editing or Joseph changing his mind” on the original manuscript. Emma Smith said he dictated without a manuscript or book in front of him (see Emma Smith’s Last Testimony). One draft. (The whole case is in Book of Mormon Evidence, Part 5: One Draft.)

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The fair test for critics

You don’t have to be a Latter-day Saint to see the complexity. Pulitzer-winning historian Daniel Walker Howe, who isn’t LDS and assumes Joseph wrote the book, still called it “a powerful epic written on a grand scale with a host of characters” and said, “Its narrative structure is complex” (What Hath God Wrought, p. 314, quoted in Hales). Even Fawn Brodie, Joseph’s harshest biographer, admitted that “never having written a line of fiction, he laid out for himself a task that would have given the most experienced novelist pause” (quoted in Hales).

So here’s the fair test. Name another 19th-century book of this length, with this many narrators, nested flashbacks, matching prophecies, and a consistent map, dictated in about 60 working days, out of order, with no notes and no rewrites. Critics have tried Spaulding, View of the Hebrews, and “a genius with a great memory,” and each theory has to explain away more of the evidence than the one before it (see galatians18.app). Hales tracked these explanations across nearly two centuries, and they keep changing.

I’m not asking anyone to believe because a book is complicated. I’m asking critics to be honest about what “he made it up” would really require. The simpler answer is the one the book gives: it’s an ancient record, translated “by the gift and power of God.” Read it for yourself, then ask God, like Moroni invites you to. (More evidence in one place: The Best Book of Mormon Evidences, and the historicity topic page.)

Sources

• Book of Mormon, via churchofjesuschrist.org: 1 Nephi 1, 1 Nephi 10, 1 Nephi 12, 1 Nephi 19, Words of Mormon, Omni, Mosiah 7–9, Mosiah 12, Mosiah 21, Mosiah 29, Alma 11, Alma 17, Alma 22, Alma 36, Alma 50, Alma 63, Helaman 14, 3 Nephi 1, 3 Nephi 8, Ether 1
• John W. Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,’” BYU Studies 57:4 (2018). Source for the Mosiah-first order, the dictation dates, the 57–63 working days, Skousen’s word count, and the Alma 36, Ether 1, and seven-tribes examples.
• Brian C. Hales, “Naturalistic Explanations of the Origin of the Book of Mormon: A Longitudinal Study,” BYU Studies 58:3 (2019). Source for the geography count (citing John L. Sorenson, The Geography of Book of Mormon Events: A Source Book, 1992) and the Howe and Brodie quotes.
• Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 314.
• Fawn M. Brodie, No Man Knows My History (Knopf, 1945), as quoted by Hales.

• Featured image and in-post graphics: original graphics by thebookofmormon.ai (no photographs or likenesses of real people).