SOURCE: “The Seer Stone Controversy: Writing The Book of Mormon,” in Mosaic, Vol. 19, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 35-53.

In the following essay, St. John Stott explains why—regardless of whether The Book of Mormon was a product of Smith's own imagination or not—it is perfectly understandable that Smith would claim that the words were indeed God's own.

In June 1829 Joseph Smith, Jr. presented himself at the office of Richard Lansing (the clerk of the Northern District of New York) to register the title of the Book of Mormon and secure copyright for the work.¹ He did so as the book's “author and proprietor,” even though the title indicated that the book was written “by the hand of Mormon,” not Joseph Smith: but Lansing probably thought nothing of this contradiction—if indeed he ever noticed it. Smith, he would have presumed, was merely pretending that the book was Mormon's...