![]() As such, it has been called the “keystone” of the 3.8-million-member Mormon church by LDS leaders. The issue is a critical one for the Latter-day Saints: they believe that the 522-page Book of Mormon is the divinely inspired, correctly translated Word of God. But as some of his contemporaries and a number of modern critics allege, the book is at least partly the pirated work of Solomon Spaulding (or Spalding), a retired Congregationalist minister and novelist who died near Pittsburgh in 1816. As Joseph Smith, the founder of the rapidly growing Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), tells it in official church writings, the book is a miraculous translation of “reformed Egyptian hieroglyphics” on golden plates he dug out of a hillside in 1827 near Palmyra, New York, a village between Rochester and Syracuse. Ever since the Book of Mormon was first published in 1830, its origins have been disputed. ![]()
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