This is about six years too late to count as a book review, but Don Bradley’s The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories is excellent. It is a rare combination of scriptural investigation and historical whodunit that is both fascinating and insightful.

Trying to discover everything that can be known or inferred about the lost manuscript of the earliest Book of Mormon translation turns out to be a fantastically productive thread to follow. The search shifts the historical and interpretive perspective in ways that bring a different set of people and issues into focus and reveals new insights on the earliest period of Church history and the text and teachings of the Book of Mormon.

For an object that hasn’t been seen in nearly 200 years, there is a surprising amount that can be discerned about the lost 116 pages from contemporary statements by those who had knowledge of it and from references in the existing Book of Mormon. While there are only a few direct historical statements and limited textual evidence, Bradley makes effective use of typological reading of the Book of Mormon to complement them.

Among other things, Bradley makes clear that Joseph Smith and his earliest followers were consciously engaged in re-enacting biblical narratives, especially Old Testament narratives. Surprisingly, reconstructing the missing text also makes clear how much of the later theology usually associated with Nauvoo and the temple ordinances (such as the language of keys and sealing) was anticipated in the Book of Mormon.

The initial chapters of The Lost 116 Pages offer concise overviews of the available evidence on the discovery of the Book of Mormon, the translation process, and the physical makeup of the plates and interpreters, although a significant degree of uncertainty remains. Bradley’s approach involves combining details from multiple witnesses (including ones rarely cited before) into a coherent whole, rather than attempting to determine the one correct version, which he uses to good effect to speculatively reconstruct the appearance of the Nephite interpreters. Bradley convincingly recreates cohesive narratives concerning the tabernacle of Lehi in the wilderness and the flight of Mosiah₁ and his followers from the land of Nephi to the land of Zarahemla, helping to add substance to poorly preserved episodes in Book of Mormon history.

There are some things that I remain uncertain about. Bradley interprets comparisons to a compass and square from eyewitness accounts of the gold plates as referring to ornate decorations, but I’m not sure they aren’t just an impression of the angular characters known from the “Caractors” document.

Bradley argues convincingly that the precise number of lost pages is unknown, and is unlikely to be precisely 116, a figure based on the text that replaced the missing pages. Bradley argues that the missing document was potentially much longer, even many hundreds of pages longer. On this point, I remain skeptical, as his reasoning rests on assumptions about translation rates and chronological density that are not implausible, but highly speculative. If I had to place a bet on the size of the document, I would bet on closer to 116 pages than twice or three times that amount. Bradley considers the size of the manuscript that would be needed to describe the centuries between Jacob and King Benjamin in the same degree of detail as the history recorded in Mosiah and Alma, but it’s striking to me that nearly all the remembered anecdotes and textual allusions to the missing material concern people, eras and events that are documented in the existing Book of Mormon. The dark centuries prior to Mosiah remain stubbornly dark, and my own guess is that the lost pages offered little or no additional information about them. I would however be overjoyed to be proven wrong.

Another source of uncertainty is that I’m not sure that nineteenth-century sources on the manuscript and the translation process use the word “page” consistently. Bradley describes how a quire of purchased paper consisted of 24 sheets, which were then folded to yield 48 pages. But in my academic niche, these would actually be 48 leaves, which could be numbered front and back as 96 pages. (While numbering leaves was more common for centuries, there are examples of printed books with numbered pages by the end of the fifteenth century.) When you pick up a single piece of lined paper, is that one or two pages? Modern usage is ambiguous, and I’m not sure that Martin Harris and other early nineteenth-century sources were any more consistent.

Instead of pretending to be a neutral observer, Bradley attempts a delicate balance between scholarship and devotion. He ends up firmly on the side of devotion, acknowledging how his scholarly project interacted with his own personal faith, and the book is stronger and more interesting for it. Bradley’s book represents over a decade of determined work. It offers numerous historical and scriptural insights and I highly recommend it.

Don Bradley. The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books, 2019