Call it an archetype, call it folklore. Whatever you call it, the idea of finding something fantastical in an old book in a library, or in a book hidden away centuries ago, is one of those things that rattles around in our minds and has been rattling around our culture for centuries if not millennia: think of the popular mystique surrounding the Dead Sea Scrolls, the various secrets (real or fanciful) thought to be contained in the Vatican archives, or the final resting place of the Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

In my area of research – Reformation-era prophetic texts, a topic of endless fascination to precisely two people in North America – the lost book rediscovered is one of the most common tropes by which prophecies explain their existence. After searching through my notes a few years ago, I came up with a hundred examples, and I could probably double that number with a thorough search. The remarkable prophecy found in an old book, or found in an old book in a particular monastic library, or found hidden behind a stone wall and written in gold letters in Turkish and Chaldean on decaying parchment, was such a common trope that it was already the subject ridicule by the early sixteenth century.

On lost books and their rediscovery, I have two observations. First, tropes and folklore can also be entirely real. Amazing things really do turn up in libraries, including books thought to have been lost for centuries.

The second observation is that in the history of Western culture, the Book of Mormon is the lost book par excellence.

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The Book of Mormon is of course literally an old book rediscovered, dug up in the literal sense by Joseph Smith in 1827. Its recovery was also accompanied by all the exotic elements that can be observed in prior lost books: written by a long-ago foreign prophet in ancient characters on a precious medium in a language beyond human ability to translate and delivered by supernatural aid. But the Book of Mormon is also a lost book in additional senses. Even when the plates were available, a part of them remained sealed. And then the book was lost again, retrieved by the angel Moroni after the translation was complete. While we can’t physically touch the gold plates, they still weigh on our imagination when we read the Book of Mormon today.

The Book of Mormon is additionally a lost book because of the 116 pages of the English translation that went missing. When we read 1 Nephi, we read it against the absence of centuries of Nephite mundane history. Most of the original manuscript dictated by Joseph Smith to his scribes has also been lost. Similarly, we possess a reproduction of some of the characters, but the transcript prepared for Charles Anthon has also been lost to history.

The miraculous preservation of the Book of Mormon is balanced by the absence of other Nephite records. One of the facts we know-but-don’t-know is that other Nephite plates existed, perhaps in the hill Cumorah, or in one of the hills Cumorah, or were seen in a vision, according to someone who reported what was said by someone who heard Joseph Smith (or someone else) say it.

If we look into the text of the Book of Mormon, we find further lost books: events that could not be written, prophecies unrecorded, allusions to unknown prophets, and plates with indeterminate relationships to the text we possess. One of the book’s recurring features is its overwhelming concern for the recovery, production, and preservation of records, including the brass plates, the Jaredite records, stones with ancient engravings, and the gold plates themselves.

So when we read the Book of Mormon, we may be looking at English words printed on paper or displayed on screen, but we are simultaneously reading a half-dozen imagined paratexts that are simultaneously present and not present. Or as Don Bradley writes, “The lost manuscript hovers spectrally at the edges of Latter-day Saint consciousness as an ever-present absence.” We read 1 Nephi while imagining what the lost 116 pages could have contained. We read Alma while imagining what was in the sealed portion of the Book of Mormon. We read 3 Nephi, and wonder what words were uttered that cannot be recorded. We read Ether, and wonder what secret oaths Moroni was commanded not to record. We read words printed in ink on paper, but those words demand that we imagine words etched on metal plates.

This sounds like mysticism, like postmodern hocus-pocus, but I’m trying to describe a real and important aspect of how we read the Book of Mormon. The reading of a text alongside and against an absent materiality or a lost textual or cultural environment is actually quite similar to some varieties of scholarly reading. If you study a manuscript fragment long enough and learn enough about it, there’s an uncanny moment when you realize that you can in some sense read the partially or entirely invisible lines of text that used to surround what is left, or even virtually recreate an entire lost manuscript from only a few preserved words.

And this is also how I understand Mosaic authorship.

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People say that we have an open canon, but the openness of our canon is only sporadically relevant. But neither is our canon static. The more directly relevant feature of our scripture is that it is incomplete. This incompleteness is particularly tangible with the Bible: Think of how we read the New Testament against the Joseph Smith Translation, an incomplete and unpublished project of indeterminate canonical status. As a supplement to the age of the Patriarchs, the Book of Abraham gives canonical status to the incompleteness of the Old Testament. And the Book of Abraham itself is shadowed by the “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language,” a poorly understood work of controversial provenance and significance that nevertheless hints at revelations deferred.

As with the Book of Abraham and the age of the Patriarchs, the Book of Moses supplements the account of the Antediluvian world in Genesis. And in Exodus as well, Moses is associated with lost writings: the tablets of the Law that he cast down in rage at the people’s faithlessness.

So we also read the works of Moses as fragmentary texts: the Law awaiting the Gospel, a preparatory priesthood awaiting a higher priesthood, and the incomplete writings of Moses awaiting their full restoration.

In the meantime, Moses remains undetectable in the historical record. Historians assure us that they can offer no evidence about his life or historical context, so we are unimpeded in approaching Moses fully through narrative. Here we are on much firmer ground, as we have the assurance of Moses’ significance in the gospels and in modern revelation. With no historical context to take into account, these sources are of course just as valid as Exodus for our narrative.

So there are similarly no impediments to speaking of Mosaic authorship. The textual history of the Pentateuch is surely full of fascinating insights, but the Pentateuch is not the writing of Moses that I’m actually interested in. I can sense those writings as I read Genesis and Exodus against the Book of Moses and modern revelation, even if I can’t physically read them. Debating the compilation history of the Pentateuch is like investigating the paper mill or ink seller who supplied the material for printing the Book of Mormon; it’s certainly interesting, but not primarily what I care about. Have you identified the compiler of the Pentateuch? Nice, well done! But can you recover the lost books of Moses? That’s what I’m actually interested in, not the pale afterimage we’re left with today.