What Was on the Brass Plates? Jonah Barnes’s “The Key to the Keystone”

There’s a scene early in the Book of Mormon that most readers hurry past. Nephi and his brothers have just risked their lives to get a set of brass plates out of Jerusalem. Their father, Lehi, sits down and reads them. And what he finds is bigger than the Old Testament we have today.

That gap, between what was on the brass plates and what made it into our Bible, is the subject of The Key to the Keystone: How Apocryphal Texts Unlock the Book of Mormon’s Brass Plates, by independent researcher Jonah R. Barnes (Plain and Precious Publishing, 2024). It’s written to inform and, in the publisher’s words, to make you “chuckle along the way,” and the question it chases is one every Latter-day Saint should care about. Let’s start with what the scriptures themselves say, and then look at what Barnes is trying to do.

What the brass plates contained

Nephi gives us a table of contents. When Lehi searched the plates:

And he beheld that they did contain the five books of Moses, which gave an account of the creation of the world, and also of Adam and Eve, who were our first parents;

And also a record of the Jews from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah;

And also the prophecies of the holy prophets, from the beginning, even down to the commencement of the reign of Zedekiah; and also many prophecies which have been spoken by the mouth of Jeremiah.

1 Nephi 5:11–13

So far, that sounds like the Old Testament up to Jeremiah. But as the Book of Mormon goes on, it quotes prophets from the brass plates whose writings aren’t in our Bible at all. Nephi names three of them in a single verse, Zenock, Neum, and Zenos, and credits them with specific prophecies about the Messiah:

And the God of our fathers, who were led out of Egypt, out of bondage, and also were preserved in the wilderness by him, yea, the God of Abraham, and of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, yieldeth himself, according to the words of the angel, as a man, into the hands of wicked men, to be lifted up, according to the words of Zenock, and to be crucified, according to the words of Neum, and to be buried in a sepulchre, according to the words of Zenos, which he spake concerning the three days of darkness, which should be a sign given of his death unto those who should inhabit the isles of the sea, more especially given unto those who are of the house of Israel.

1 Nephi 19:10

Zenos gets the most space. Jacob 5, the long allegory of the olive tree, is presented as his words. Whoever these prophets were, the Book of Mormon treats them as part of Israel’s scripture in Lehi’s day. They are gone from ours.

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The Bible admits it’s missing books

That’s not a strange idea, because the Bible itself mentions books it doesn’t contain. The Chronicler sends readers elsewhere for David’s history:

Now the acts of David the king, first and last, behold, they are written in the book of Samuel the seer, and in the book of Nathan the prophet, and in the book of Gad the seer,

1 Chronicles 29:29 (KJV)

We have books called Samuel. We don’t have the book of Nathan the prophet or the book of Gad the seer. Jude quotes a prophecy of Enoch that appears nowhere in the Old Testament:

And Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints,

Jude 1:14 (KJV)

And Matthew cites a prophecy, He shall be called a Nazarene, that no Old Testament book contains in those words. The New Testament writers clearly had access to prophetic material we don’t. Hebrews even describes prophets who were sawn asunder, which matches an ancient Jewish and Christian tradition about Isaiah’s death that is also not in the Old Testament.

The Book of Mormon gives a reason for the gap. Nephi saw in vision that the record of the Jews would lose material as it was handed down:

Wherefore, thou seest that after the book hath gone forth through the hands of the great and abominable church, that there are many plain and precious things taken away from the book, which is the book of the Lamb of God.

1 Nephi 13:28

I made a related argument in The Old Testament WAS Christian, but someone altered it! If the New Testament says all the prophets testified of Christ, where are those testimonies?

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Then the sands started giving texts back

Here’s where it gets interesting. In 1830, the Book of Mormon claimed a richer, more Christ-centered Israelite scripture than the Bible preserves. Over the next century and a half, a flood of ancient texts came to light. The Nag Hammadi library was found in Egypt in 1945. The Dead Sea Scrolls began turning up in caves near Qumran in 1947, and among them were Aramaic fragments of the Book of Enoch, the same Enoch tradition Jude quoted. Other pseudepigrapha, writings attributed to biblical figures, were edited, translated, and studied far more widely in the twentieth century than ever before.

Barnes’s project is to put those texts next to the Book of Mormon and ask what they reveal about the brass plates. His publisher’s description says he uses paleography and philology to reconstruct their contents, and it lists the questions the book sets out to answer, including:

• “Which books were on the brass plates stolen by Lehi in 597 BC? Can we read them?”
• “Who corrupted the Old Testament canon? And how badly?”
• “How did the prophet Isaiah die? Who killed him and why?”
• “Why does the Book of Mormon sound too Messianic and not more Mosaic?”
• “Do the apocrypha support the authority of the Bible? Or do they support the Book of Mormon?”

That list tells you the book’s spirit. It’s not a dry catalog; it’s an argument, and it’s written to be enjoyed.

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The “too Messianic” objection

The question I think matters most is the fourth one. Critics often say the Book of Mormon is “too Christian” for a pre-Christian text. Nephites centuries before Christ talk about Him by name, preach faith in Him, and look forward to His atonement. Nephi says it plainly:

And we talk of Christ, we rejoice in Christ, we preach of Christ, we prophesy of Christ, and we write according to our prophecies, that our children may know to what source they may look for a remission of their sins.

2 Nephi 25:26

Jacob explains that this wasn’t unique to his family, but was the testimony of the earlier prophets too:

For, for this intent have we written these things, that they may know that we knew of Christ, and we had a hope of his glory many hundred years before his coming; and not only we ourselves had a hope of his glory, but also all the holy prophets which were before us.

Jacob 4:4

The usual response is that real Israelite religion in 600 BC didn’t look like that. But Jesus Himself said the Old Testament prophets were full of Him. On the road to Emmaus:

And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself.

Luke 24:27 (KJV)

If Moses and all the prophets spoke of Christ, then an Israelite record that speaks openly of Christ isn’t an anachronism. It’s what the Bible’s own claims would lead us to expect, if more of the record had survived. That’s why later-discovered texts with strong messianic themes are relevant. They show that pre-Christian Jewish writing could be far more focused on a coming divine deliverer than the critics’ picture of “Mosaic” religion allows. It’s one of the questions Barnes takes on directly.

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How to read a book like this well

A word of caution, from someone who loves this kind of research. Parallels are evidence, not proof. Apocryphal texts are a mixed bag: some preserve old traditions, some are much later, and some are a blend. The Lord told Joseph Smith that the Apocrypha contains many things contained therein that are true, and also that it contains interpolations by men, so reading it takes the Spirit and judgment. Any reconstruction of what was “on the brass plates” is a hypothesis, and Barnes presents it as research, not revelation.

But the core claim doesn’t depend on any single parallel. The Book of Mormon said in 1830 that Israel’s scripture once held more, and held more about Christ. The Bible itself admits missing books. And the texts that came out of the ground after 1830 keep pointing in the same direction. That’s worth a careful look, and The Key to the Keystone is a lively place to start.

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