This book narrates the history of Mormonism’s fourth volume of scripture, canonized in 1880. The book tracks this work’s predecessors, describes its several components, and assesses their theological significance in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Four principal parts are discussed, along with the controversies associated with each. The Book of Moses purports to be a Mosaic narrative missing from the biblical version of Moses’s purported writings. Little noticed in the scholarship on Mormonism, these chapters, produced only months after the Book of Mormon was published, actually contain almost all of Mormonism’s core doctrines as well as a virtual template for the project of Restoration Joseph Smith was to effect. Most controversial of all is the Book of Abraham, a production that arose out of a group of papyri Smith acquired, along with four mummies, in 1835. Most of the papyri disappeared in the great Chicago fire of 1871, but the surviving fragments come from Egyptian documents. That fact and the translations Smith attempted to make from the hieroglyphs on the surviving vignettes have convinced most Egyptologists that Smith’s work was fraudulent or inept. Mormon scholars, however, have developed several frameworks for vindicating its inspiration and his calling as a prophet. Chapter 3 attempts to make sense of Smith’s several, at times divergent, accounts of his First Vision, one of which is canonized as scripture. Chapter 4 assesses the creedal nature of Smith’s “Articles of Faith” in the context of his professed anticreedalism.
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