"Days Never to be Forgotten"

“These were days never to be forgotten—to sit under the sound of a voice dictated by the inspiration of heaven, awakened the utmost gratitude of this bosom!” – Oliver Cowdery

My wife and I were recently asked to teach some of our ward’s graduating seniors the Church’s temple preparation class.[1] As temple leaders, one of our most pleasurable and treasured assignments was to greet and provide First Presidency instructions to what temple workers refer to as “own endowment” patrons, or individuals who come to the temple to receive their own endowments. Previously, as stake and ward leaders, we ministered and oversaw the ministering efforts of ward and stake council members to help prepare members to accept an invitation to attend a temple preparation class—and then to be endowed. Now, as we teach these young people who are preparing for this sacred and singular event in their lives, we have come full circle in the Lord’s program of temple preparation.

Image from “A Day for the Eternities” churchofjesuschrist.org/media

Thus, I am always alert to any announcements from the Church about how we as parents, grandparents and Church members in our callings can better help family members and others prepare not only to receive their own temple ordinances, but to grow in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of these exalting ordinances. In this regard, you may have read about the Church’s recently announced new Topics and Questions section of ChurchofJesusChrist.org about temples.[2]

In the Overview section of the new Temples Q&A, the very first sentence restates a consistent theme not only of these blogs but also of a truth that becomes readily apparent as one dives into the subject of LDS temple doctrine and practices. “Throughout time, God has commanded His children to build temples.”[3] This was true for Adam, for Moses, for Lehi and Nephi, for early Christians,[4] and, more importantly for this study, for Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints. Why is this truth foundational? Because, as the Q&A further explains, “temple ordinances and covenants have been an integral part of the gospel since the days of Adam and Eve.”[5]

But some have wondered, if Joseph Smith was in fact restoring temple ordinances as they existed since Adam and Eve, “why,” as the Q&A asks, “have there been some adjustments to temple procedures and ceremonies over time?” While I do not have all the answers, I have every confidence in the Church’s answer, which is that God Himself is the source of all things temple related, including temple adjustments. As the Q&A explains:

In the early days of the restored Church, the Lord revealed to Joseph Smith all the ordinances and covenants that are associated with temples today. As Joseph received more revelation and experience, he also adjusted the procedures of these ordinances to better instruct the Saints while preserving the eternal laws, doctrine, and principles they were founded on.

Similarly, under the Lord’s direction other Latter-day prophets have adjusted the way temple covenants and ordinances are administered. These adjustments have been made in response to revelation as prophets have sought the Lord’s guidance about the best way to explain and take the blessings of the temple to the Lord’s children.

Citing President Harold B. Lee’s 1959 explanation to ordinance workers at the Salt Lake Temple as to why “we are having new methods” of presenting temple ordinances, the Q&A asserts, “but the truths are the same regardless of how they are presented. We may expect to have more new methods,” President Lee stated, “but the fundamentals will not be changed.”[6]

Finally, to be abundantly clear, the Q&A quotes President Russell M. Nelson’s explanation in 2021 that “adjustments . . . made to the temple ceremonies” at that time were “made under the Lord’s direction”:

[President Nelson] said: “[The Lord] is the One who wants you to understand with great clarity exactly what you are making covenants to do. He is the One who wants you to experience fully His sacred ordinances. He wants you to comprehend your privileges, promises, and responsibilities. He wants you to have spiritual insights and awakenings you’ve never had before. This He desires for all temple patrons, no matter where they live.”[7]

In other words, it appears that adjustments to temple ordinances have everything to do with us, God’s children, and how we process and apply knowledge. The same could be said about understanding the way in which the Lord worked through the Prophet Joseph Smith and all the early-day Saints to bring about every aspect of the Restoration. The Lord’s methed for revealing truth—waiting for us to ask and then giving “here a little, and there a little” (D&C 128:21; 2 Nephi 28:30)—has everything to do with the recipients’ cultural context, “their weakness,” including “the manner of their language.” Why? That we “might come to understanding” (D&C 1:24). One of the best illustrations of this process, as we have seen in previous blogs, is the story of the coming forth of the Book of Mormon.

The remarkable speed of the Book of Mormon translation

Scholars, including those within and outside of the Latter-day Saint community, have extensively examined how long it took, with estimates ranging from 60 to 120 translation days, and in what order, Joseph Smith is believed to have translated the Book of Mormon. One of the most thorough treatments, Opening the Heavens, published by BYU Studies, summarizes 150 pages of documentary evidence describing Joseph’s activities from 1828 to 1829.[8] The documents establish five “anchor dates” or events, each supported by “corroborating details,” which point “reasonably to the conclusion that, with the probable exception of a few pages written before Oliver Cowdery’s arrival on April 5, the vast majority of the English text of the Book of Mormon came forth, day after day, and hour by hour, beginning April 7 and ending the weekend of June 30, 1829.”[9]

How many days within this narrow 85-day period did Joseph and Oliver have to devote to the work of dictating and transcribing the manuscript? To answer this question, John W. Welch, the editor of Opening the Heavens, argued, you first need to exclude 11 days “when it is reasonably clear that Joseph was on trips or otherwise identifiably occupied, during which no translation could have occurred.”

Moreover, to these 11 days must be added other days “that were only partially available for translation work” to do such things as conduct personal business, including making the second payment to Isaac Hale on the Smith’s home in Harmony; “farming, household chores and personal time;” “priesthood restorations;” a trip to Colesville to get supplies; “baptisms in Harmony;” “time with Samuel Smith and his baptism;” “teaching and baptizing Hyrum Smith;” “greeting and satisfying David Whitmer in Harmony;” “arranging to ordain priests and teachers per Doctrine and Covenants 18:32;” “planning for and gathering the Eight Witnesses;” attending to publication details; and the like.

Finally, you would need to consider the time required to “receive, deliver, and record” 13 revelations received during this April to June period.[10]

Considering all these interruptions, Welch concludes, “it would appear that not many more than the equivalent of about 60 [to 64] actual working days would have been available in April, May, and June 1829. The timing is remarkable.”[11] 

The order of translation

Welch and others agree that after the loss of the 116 manuscript pages, Joseph began translating where he left off from the Book of Lehi with what now appears as “Chapter 1” of “The Book of Mosiah” (what scholars refer to as the “Mosiah-First” theory of translation). The JSP editors note that before Oliver’s arrival, during “the months of February and March 1829, Samuel Smith, Martin Harris, and Emma Smith all may have served briefly as scribes as JS translated small portions of the Book of Mormon."[12] However, it is unclear how many pages of the original Book of Mormon manuscript had been dictated and transcribed before Oliver’s arrival.

Welch assumes, based on historical evidence, that Oliver began transcribing “somewhere in Mosiah 2, about five or six pages into Mosiah.”[13] Thus, only after finishing the book of Mosiah, then Alma, Helaman, 3 and 4 Nephi, Mormon, Ether and Moroni, would Joseph and Oliver have turned to the Small Plates—1 Nephi through Omni and, finally, the Words of Mormon.[14] 

Royal Skousen in his study of the printer’s manuscript estimated there were 608 pages in the original Book of Mormon manuscript with a total of 269,510 words. Assuming various rates of translation (from 10 to 20 words per minute) and number of hours worked per day (from 3 to 8 hours per day), Welch shows that it would have been possible to complete the translation within the up to 64 working days the historical record shows would have been available.

Based on the available evidence and the assumptions described above, Welch provides a chart estimating day by day when Joseph may have translated each chapter in the Book of Mormon. The chart not only ties into the key “anchor” and other dates established by the historical record, but provides valuable insights as to how the Book of Mormon text then being translated correlates with, and may have influenced, not only events in the Restoration—such as the restoration of the Aaronic and Melchizedek Priesthoods—but the revelations that would become part of the Doctrine and Covenants Joseph received during this critical period of his spiritual education.

Why understanding the translation order matters

An understanding of the historical context of the translation process also, as Welch notes, “increase[s] [our] awe and reverence for God and the word of God.” Awe not only for the unprecedented pace of translation,[15] but “the marvel of perceiving and vocalizing the text, line after line, with no time for research, for collocating scattered scriptural phrases, for keeping track of numerous threads, for developing an array of characters and their stylistic voices, or for composing coherent accounts.”[16]

Understanding the order of translation also increases our appreciation for Joseph’s claim that the book was translated by the “gift and power of God,” as opposed to the multitudinous alternative theories of critics that it was produced through some naturalistic means.[17]

If the Book of Mormon is considered an ancient, translated record, then it is natural for later prophets (such as Mormon or Alma, whose writings appear in the Mosiah-Moroni block) to refer back to the teachings and prophecies of earlier figures like Lehi and Nephi (whose writings are primarily in the Small Plates block). However, if one approaches the text from the perspective of 19th-century authorship (that is, that Joseph made it up), the Mosiah-First sequence implies that Joseph Smith would have created references in the Mosiah-Moroni section to material from the Small Plates that he had not yet “written” or dictated. This would necessitate either intricate pre-planning or an extraordinary capacity for recall and narrative consistency. Literary scholar Alan Goff commented on this complexity, noting that it seems “overly complicated to posit that a whole web of allusions . . . is created first and then later the coherent story that ties them all together.”[18]

Welch cites a few of many possible examples of such intricate inter-textual allusions:

•     “How might the record’s ability to keep the lifespans of Alma’s genealogy all in line be reanalyzed if one realizes that that lineage history is widely dispersed among passages that were translated over a span of six weeks, from April 11 to May 22?”

•     “How might the timing of the translation affect one’s thoughts about the significance of the fact that the thirty names in the Jaredite genealogy in Ether 1—running from Ether back in time to Jared—would have been dictated on one day, and then they were repeated (apparently without any notes) in exactly the opposite order—from Jared down to Ether—as the story of those Jaredite rulers was translated over the next three days in Ether 2–11?”

•     “How might the sequence of the translation affect one’s reading of the account of the great destructions in 3 Nephi 8, which was translated about May 12, as it fulfills prophecies that were detailed in 1 Nephi 19, which was translated a month later?”

•     “The antithetically parallel words of Alma the Younger as he came out of his three-day coma were translated in Mosiah 27 on about April 13, while his chiastic retelling of that conversion event twenty years later in Alma 36 (which was translated about ten days later on April 24, 1829) reincorporated many of the same distinctive words and phrases.”[19]

Seventeenth-century clergyman Thomas Fuller is credited with saying “seeing is believing.” But what he actually said is “seeing is believing, but feeling is the truth.”[20] My witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon is based on the undeniable feeling of the Holy Ghost I receive whenever I read or study the book, born to my soul throughout my life. However, as the so-called “secondary” evidences of the ancient origin of the Book of Mormon (as Joseph testified) multiply, for me believing has also become seeing. Seeing “how merciful the Lord hath been unto the children of men, from the creation of Adam even down unto” our time, when we have this marvelous record. Indeed, it is something that each of us would do well to “ponder [in] our hearts” (Moroni 10:3).

[1] See Endowed from on High: Temple Preparation Seminar Teacher’s Manual, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/endowed-from-on-high?lang=eng. [2] News Release, “Find Answers to Questions on Church Finances, Temples and Peacemaking: Gospel Library resources continue to address frequently asked questions,” May 22, 2025, https://newsroom.churchofjesuschrist.org/article/topics-questions-church-finances-temples-peacemaking. [3] “Church and Gospel Questions: Temples of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/temples-of-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints?lang=eng#p_sSu1M. [4] See, for example, David Calabro, “Early Christian Temples and Baptism for the Dead: Defining Sacred Space in the Late Antique Near East,” Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship, vol. 46, article 8, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol46/iss1/8.   [5] “Church and Gospel Questions: Temples – Why can temple worship seem more ceremonial in nature than other Church experiences?” https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/manual/gospel-topics/temples-of-the-church-of-jesus-christ-of-latter-day-saints?lang=eng#p_sSu1M. [6] Ibid. [7] Ibid., quoting Russell M. Nelson, “The Temple and Your Spiritual Foundation,” Liahona, November 2012, 95. [8] John W. Welch, ed., Opening the Heavens: Accounts of Divine Manifestations, 1820–1844 (Second Edition), Provo, Utah: BYU Studies, 2017), https://byustudies.byu.edu/online-book/opening-the-heavens. [9] John W. Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,’” BYU Studies Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 4 (2018), 17, https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol57/iss4/3/. [10] Ibid. 30-34. [11] Ibid. 34. [12] Joseph Smith’s Revelations, “Doctrine and Covenants 10: Revelation, Spring 1829,” note 5, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/church-historians-press/jsp-revelations/dc-010-1829_04_01_005?lang=eng. [13] Jack Lyon and Kent Minon argue that the last half of Words of Mormon (verses 12-18) were part of Chapter II of the Book of Mosiah1, which Martin Harris would have transcribed along with the Book of Lehi. They note: “D&C 10:41 shows that Joseph had translated more than the 116 pages he gave to Martin Harris: ‘You shall translate the engraving which are on the [small] plates of Nephi, down even till you come to the reign of king Bejamin, or until you come to that which you have translated, which you have retained’ (emphasis added). . . . Why did he retain it? Probably because it was written in the next gathering of manuscript pages, which, at the time, was only partially filled.”

Lyon and Minon point out that the Book of Mormon manuscript was not a stack of separate sheets of paper, but “gatherings” of “six large sheets of paper folded lengthwise and held together with a string. Royal Skousen estimates the original 116 pages to have been five such gatherings, four with six sheets (and thus twenty-four pages each) and one with five sheets (and thus twenty pages),” for a total of 116 pages.

Skousen, who did the definitive study of the original manuscript, labelled his gatherings as follows: A1 to A5 – “the book of Lehi plus the first part of Mosiah” A6 to A9 – “a few pages from the original [second chapter] of Mosiah, plus the current text from Mosiah 1 into Alma 5”.

Thus, when Oliver started transcribing for Joseph, he started where the previous scribes had left off in Mormon’s abridgement of the large plates, with Chapter III of the Book of Mosiah, followed by the books of Alma, Helaman and so forth. After translating the remainder of the large plates, including Mormon’s and Moroni’s books, Joseph asked the Lord if he should go back and retranslate the beginning of the Book of Mormon story told in the Book of Lehi, which he had previously translated, and Martin Harris had lost. The Lord responded “no,” he should instead translate the small plates of Nephi, which Mormon had been inspired to insert into his record and which covered the same period of the Book of Mormon story (from Lehi to the reign of King Benjamin).(For a discussion of the timing of the receipt of this revelation, now contained in D&C 10, see “Doctrine and Covenants 10: Revelation, Spring 1829,” Joseph Smith’s Revelations: A Doctrine and Covenants Study Companion from the Joseph Smith Papers, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/church-historians-press/jsp-revelations/dc-010-1829_04_01_005?lang=eng.).

When Oliver prepared the printer’s manuscript, following the last words of Words of Mormon (“ . . . king Benjamin by laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul, and also the prophets, did once more establish peace in the land.”), he wrote a dash, “ ̴̴̴ ̴ ̴ ̴ ”, which was followed by “Chapter III.” He then wrote above the dash the word “Mosiah” and then crossed through the last two numerals in III (so it appears in the manuscript as “Chapter III”). In other words, Lyon and Minton reason, Joseph “had faithfully copied the chapter designation “Chapter III” from the original manuscript, but where were Chapter I and Chapter II?”

The answer, Lyon and Minton suggest, is that in the lost 116 pages, the Book of Lehi was followed by the Book of Mosiah (following Mormon’s convention to name books after the first author, Mosiah1), Chapters I and II of which are part of the lost 116 pages. When Oliver began transcribing for Joseph, he continued with the gathering A6-A9, which included the rest of Mosiah and Alma through Alma 5. Then on a separate leaf of pages, or gathering(s), he finished the rest of the plates from Alma 6 through the books of Mormon and Moroni. Then, on a gathering Skousen denominated as B1-B6, he transcribed 1 Nephi to Jacob 4:1-4. Finally, after buying more paper, he transcribed from Jacob 5 to end of the small plates, probably including the Words of Mormon in a gathering Skousen identified as B6.

Lyon and Minton summarize their conclusion of the original sources for the printer’s manuscript text as follows:

The Words of Mormon[v1] And now I , Mormon, being about to deliver up the record which I have been making into the hands of my son Moroni, behold I have witnessed almost all the destruction of my people, the Nephites. . . . [v11] And they were handed down from king Benjamin, from generation to generation until they have fallen into my hands. And I, Mormon, pray to God that they may be preserved from this time henceforth. And I know that they will be preserved; for there are great things written upon them, out of which my people and their brethren shall be judged at the great and last day, according to the word of God which is written. [The Book of Mosiah] [Chapter 1: In lost 116 pages] [Chapter 2: First part in lost 116 pages] . . . [Words of Mormon v. 12] And now, concerning this king Benjamin—he had somewhat of contentions among his own people. . . . [v18] Wherefore, with the help of these, king Benjamin, by laboring with all the might of his body and the faculty of his whole soul, and also the prophets, did once more establish peace in the land. Chapter 3 [Mosiah 1:1] And now there was no more contention in all the land of Zarahemla among all the People which belonged to King Benjamin . . .

Jack M. Lyon and Kent R. Minson, “When Pages Collide: Dissecting the Words of Mormon,” BYU Studies Quarterly, vol. 51, no. 4 (2012), https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol51/iss4/10/. For photographs and a transcription of the relevant pages in the printer’s manuscript, see Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, circa August 1829–circa January 1830, p. 116, JSP, accessed June 4, 2025, https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/printers-manuscript-of-the-book-of-mormon-circa-august-1829-circa-january-1830/120. [13] Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon,” 22-23 (“There is a strong consensus that Joseph picked up where the lost manuscript pages had left off, which would have been in the time of King Benjamin’s reign.”) [15] See, e.g., Russell M. Nelson, “A Testimony of the Book of Mormon,” Ensign, November 1999 (observing that, during the approximately 55 working days for translation, Joseph translated at the pace of 10 pages per day compared to the “50 English scholars who accomplished” the translation of the Bible “in seven years, translating at the rate of one page per day”). [16] Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon,” 44. [17] For a brief historical overview of the criticism of the Book of Mormon’s divine origin, see Terrel L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture that Launched a New World Religion, New York: New York, 2002, 155-84. [18] Alan Goff, “Positivism and the Priority of Ideology in Mosiah-First Theories of Book of Mormon Production,” FARMS Review 16, no. 1 (2004): 11–36, as quoted in Scripture Central, “Book of Mormon Evidence: Mosiah-First Translation,” Evidence #86, September 19, 2020. [19] Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon,” 41-42. [20] Kenneth Kovacs, “Seeing is Believing,” April 9, 2023, https://catonsvillepres.org/sermons/seeing-is-believing/#:~:text=The%20adage%20%E2%80%9Cseeing%20is%20believing,leads%20us%20toward%20the%20truth.