How long book of mormon

Smith [Joseph Smith, Sr. Oliver arrived in Harmony as the sun was going down on Sunday, 5 April After a day for Oliver to get settled, Joseph began translating on Tuesday, April 7, with Oliver as his scribe. Thus, the Prophet Joseph actually began translating at the middle of the book; it is probable that he did not work on 1 and 2 Nephi until later—in June.

Indeed, the fact that a passage like Alma , which quotes Lehi so fluently and precisely, was translated before 1 Nephi [ 1 Ne. That, in turn, led to the restoration of the Aaronic Priesthood on that same day, and to that of the Melchizedek Priesthood shortly thereafter.

By the end of May, they had completed the books of 4 Nephi, Mormon, Ether, Moroni, and the title page—which stood as the last plate among the plates of Mormon. During the first week in June, David, Oliver, Joseph, and possibly Emma moved one hundred miles, on buckboard, to the Peter Whitmer home in Fayette, New York, about twenty-five miles southeast of Palmyra.

Once Joseph, Emma, and Oliver were settled in Fayette, the translation resumed. Oliver and John Whitmer acted as scribes, and it was here that they worked on what is the beginning of the Book of Mormon as we know it—1 Nephi and 2 Nephi.

By around 20 June, they had reached 2 Nephi , [ 2 Ne. For all other enquiries regarding the show, please visit the Book of Mormon website or contact them directly. You must set your browser to accept cookies and to enable Javascript in order to access certain functions of this site, including the purchase of tickets. Find Tickets. Theatre Location. The Book of Mormon Theatre Features. All you need to know about The Book of Mormon The comical musical comes to Ireland for the first time.

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For reasons that surely pleased and maybe also surprised Oliver, Joseph took Oliver immediately into his full confidence. Perhaps by comparing the details they had each seen independently in their visionary and revelatory experiences, both of them were completely confident that the other was telling the truth.

With that assurance, Joseph allowed Oliver to work as his dedicated scribe, seated only a few feet away at the same small table, as Joseph translated. But how sure can one be that Oliver remembered the date, April 7, correctly? Five years later, in , Oliver wrote to William W.

These were days never to be forgotten. At the courthouse, Madsen found the legal papers for the sale by Joseph of his property in Harmony to George Noble, a local businessman. He may well have accompanied Joseph Sr. In either event, farm work would probably have consumed a good part of the rest of the day on April 6. A ledger on the back of the April 6 agreement shows that Joseph paid Isaac sixty-four dollars that day and promised to pay the balance in the future, which he did.

This legal transaction gave Joseph Smith ownership and the legal right to say who could or could not come onto his property and into his small wooden home there. With that, he had a degree of essential security to protect against Isaac Hale or others who might disturb the translation process. And with that, the very next day—April 7—Joseph and Oliver commenced work. Thus anchor date 1 is substantially secure. Before that date, and without property rights and protective security, little translation took place in the first three months of Of course, a year before, the book of Lehi had been translated, with Martin Harris as the main scribe.

Emma and Reuben Hale apparently acted as scribes in those three months as well. At least six documents say that a little was translated in prior to April 7. Without going into all of these sometimes conflicting historical sources in detail, 22 here are the main documents relevant to this point:. So how many pages of the original manuscript of the current Book of Mormon might have been written before Oliver Cowdery arrived on April 5?

Of course, we do not know for sure. Although our information is limited, the foregoing six statements are evidence that only a few pages of dictation were written between the summer of and April How many words would usually have been written on a page of common foolscap manuscript paper? Royal Skousen estimates that there were pages of manuscript in the dictation copy of the Book of Mormon and that the earliest text contained a total of , words, 30 thus there were on average At this rate, the words in Mosiah 1 would have taken about 2.

One percent of the total Book of Mormon would be 2, words, or approximately 6. We do not know, of course, exactly at what point in the dictation Oliver commenced to write on April 7. Was it early in Mosiah 2 or later in Mosiah 3 or Mosiah 4? But no part of the book of Mosiah has survived in the original manuscript pages or fragments.

Not wanting to overestimate or underestimate the number of pages written by Emma or Samuel before Oliver Cowdery arrived, I have assumed that the point at which Joseph and Oliver began working was somewhere in Mosiah 2, about five or six pages into Mosiah. They may, of course, have begun at the end of Mosiah 1 or in Mosiah 3 or Mosiah 4 or later. If readers wish to move this commencement point to a place a few chapters later in the text of Mosiah and then make adjustments to the charts presented in this article, that would not necessarily change any overall conclusions significantly.

At whatever point Joseph and Oliver began working on April 7, that starting date need not be further debated for present purposes. No data suggests or implies that anchor date 1 is insecure as the day on which they commenced. Anchor Date 2: May Joseph and Oliver reached the middle of 3 Nephi before May 15, These accounts may indicate that they were not translating 3 Nephi 11 and 12 on May 15 but had translated those chapters a day or two earlier. That would allow time for Joseph to wonder overnight about the need to be baptized.

At that point, John the Baptist appeared and gave them instructions and authority. On the chart page 46 , I estimate that the text in 3 Nephi 13—15 was translated on May 14 and that 3 Nephi 16—18 was finished during the afternoon or evening of May The ordination to the higher priesthood by Peter, James, and John may have occurred about May 19 since Joseph and Oliver were returning from a trip to Colesville for supplies about that time, but that remains uncertain although compatible with this overall chronology.

Counting from anchor date 2, Joseph and Oliver were right on schedule to finish the large plates by the end of May, assuming that they continued at a steady pace of translation throughout April and May, both before and after May Anchor Date 3: May This date is derived from several circumstantial evidences that lead to the likely conclusion that the title page of the Book of Mormon was translated on or shortly before May 31, Anchor Date 4: June The June 11 date for securing the copyright for the Book of Mormon is clearly trustworthy.

We have long had the Joseph Smith copy of the copyright form, and when the official court version of that document was found in at the Library of Congress in Washington, D. The Joseph Smith copy was a secondary, personal copy that he retained.

Both the retained copy and the official filed copy were signed on June 11, , by R. Lansing, clerk of the U. As a bonus, attached to that official copy at the Library of Congress was a previously unknown printed mock-up sheet of the title page of the Book of Mormon.

The wording though not the font or layout is identical to the final printed version of the title page. The mock-up sheet was printed on a letterpress; it was folded as was normally done with filed legal documents in that day, and it was identified and dated. It is not known who printed it or how much time it took to have that done. Perhaps Joseph or Hyrum had already been in contact with a printer such as E.

Grandin, who supplied the copyright form and information about how to file the form with the federal court. This single sheet was folded and kept with the copyright form, and on the back of this printed page the name of Joseph Smith was written, and it is dated June 11, It is unknown who delivered this certificate to the clerk of the court.

Was it Joseph? Martin Harris? Did the clerk happen to be in Palmyra or around Fayette facilitating such filings, or did someone make the six-day round trip from Fayette to Utica and back to handle this filing? However, I figure that, at a regular pace, only three days would have been normally available for Joseph to cover those chapters, and the journey took six days.

So perhaps it was Martin who made the trip. Still, one cannot know for sure who carried the form to be filed. What the copyright filing tells us for sure is that the title page of the Book of Mormon was finished and written before June Anchor Date 5: June The completion of the translation by the end of June is quite well established.

Around Sunday, June 28, the translation was finished, and word was delivered that evening to Joseph Smith Sr. The next day, perhaps Monday, June 29, they arrived just before sunset, and the next morning, they read from the Book of Mormon manuscript, sang, and prayed, and David Whitmer, Oliver Cowdery, and Martin Harris went directly with Joseph to where they received their previously promised manifestation by the angel Moroni.

On Wednesday, June 30, or perhaps the first day or two of July, they all gathered at the Smith home in Manchester, where the Eight Witnesses were allowed to handle the plates. Then the testimonies of the Witnesses were written, since soon thereafter they would appear in the preface to the first edition of the Book of Mormon. Thus, for present purposes, as far as I am aware, no evidence suggests that any of the translation continued after June It is hard to imagine a time or place for any translation to have occurred during the month of July.

By the first of July, Joseph had relocated to Manchester, where Joseph and Martin began contacting printers. Then Joseph met successfully with Elihu Marshall a Quaker book publisher also in Rochester and, finally, this time successfully, again with Grandin in Palmyra.

Joseph was with Martin Harris during some of this time, but he was not with Oliver, who was in Fayette at that time. It is unlikely that Joseph carried any of the original manuscript with him as he met with these publishers.

In answering the questions of how many days the translation took and how precise we can be about that time frame, we need to know 1 how many actual days Joseph and his scribe had and 2 how many words per day, on average, they needed to write to finish. The total number of days, from April 7 to June 30, inclusive, is eighty-five. This explains the use of that number in some estimates. Other estimates mention seventy-five, sixty-five, sixty-three, or sixty days. In the chart, I have excluded eleven full days, 52 including days such as May 18—19 or June 1—4 or other timespans, when it is reasonably clear that Joseph was on trips or otherwise identifiably occupied, during which no translation could have occurred at all.

These eleven days have been eliminated because of the following events:. For computational purposes, it is not crucial where within the total time frame those specific days fell.

It matters only that those events happened and approximately how much time they would have taken. In addition, there must have been many days during that time period that were only partially available for translation work.

On the chart, this sort of time has been reflected only in the average number of pages that would have needed to be translated within the overall time frame.

These probable time demands would have been spent on various days for such things as:. And finally, at least one more day can be reserved to allow for the process of receiving, delivering, and recording thirteen revelations now included in the Doctrine and Covenants:.

The total number of words in these thirteen revelations is 6, Assuming twenty words per minute—which may be on the fast side—the time it would take to dictate and transcribe these individual sections computes to another minutes, or at least five hours, or close to one more full day, allowing time for stopping, discussing, and interviewing and seeking, receiving, recording, and delivering the revelation to the recipient, as well as talking about it, getting back to work on the translation, and so on.

These thirteen revelations in April, May, and June must be taken into account when estimating the amount of time and effort required to bring forth the Book of Mormon translation during those same months. Taken all together, these numbers yield a total of only 57 to 63 available full-time working days—74 minus 11 to 17 days. Perhaps these interruptions did not require quite that many hours or that many half-days, but even if that were the case, it would appear that not many more than the equivalent of about 60 actual working days would have been available in April, May, and June The timing is remarkable.

As discussed above, because the amount of translation and transcription work accomplished from September to March was probably relatively little, and because Joseph probably had learned to translate more efficiently as he brought forth the lost manuscript pages in , and because Oliver was no doubt more skillful as a scribe than Martin Harris or others had been, the work most likely went faster in April, May, and June than it had in , which helps to explain the feasibility of the rapidity of the translation in It is interesting to connect these thirteen sections in the Doctrine and Covenants that were received in April, May, or June with the timing and sequence of the translation of passages in the Book of Mormon.

Beyond the fact that receiving and recording these revelations took time, these revelations can be connected to the unfolding of words and phrases within the Book of Mormon itself. These correlations do not affect estimations of how long the translation took, but they do suggest a little more clearly approximate times when those revelations might have been received as well as when certain portions of the Book of Mormon were translated. For present purposes, these thirteen revelations have simply been positioned on the chart on days close to where some of their phrases connect with relatable Book of Mormon texts.

This chronological coalescing happens fairly consistently and distinctively, offering a stream of interconnections. Doctrine and Covenants 8 can be placed at about April 9, which is approximately the time of the translation of Mosiah 8.

Both of those texts deal with the power to translate. The phrases in Doctrine and Covenants 9, dated to around April 26, connect with words in Alma 11 or 40, which would have been translated around that date. Doctrine and Covenants 7 has been placed on May 21 because of possible connections to 3 Nephi That question was most relevant to the blessing that Jesus gave to the Three Nephites that they would not taste death either.

These, of course, are just interesting approximations. How long did it take him to generate that significant document? The better part of a day, one would think. I have placed this document on Sunday, June 21, because it quotes from verse 4 of the recently received Doctrine and Covenants 18 and it also meaningfully and precisely quotes at least 36 verses from the Book of Mormon verifiably following the original manuscript , many of them in full, namely in this order : 3 Nephi , 23—27; Moroni , 4, 2—3; 3 Nephi ; 2 Nephi ; Moroni ; —3; —2; 3 Nephi —33; ; Alma ; ; ; 3 Nephi ; Doctrine and Covenants ; 3 Nephi , 16; Doctrine and Covenants ; 3 Nephi ; Ether ; and 2 Nephi In writing this document, Oliver must have taken time to remember, locate, arrange, and copy out these passages, quoting them exactly.

This document powerfully summarizes key ecclesiastical and administrative provisions that are scattered throughout the Book of Mormon, dealing with performing the ordinance of baptism, the elders ordaining priests and teachers, administering the sacrament, excommunications, laws of the church, promising blessings, invoking authority, and preparing to stand before Christ and being saved eternally in his kingdom through his infinite Atonement.

Addressing all of these topics is an impressive and time-absorbing feat, especially since the original manuscript had no finding aids, no chapter and verse numbers, and still remained to be mentally processed and reflectively studied. All of this explains my thinking in spreading the chapters of the Book of Mormon across the total elapsed time of 74 days on the chart.

The suggested dates on which specific chapters may have been translated are not to be taken as certain; they are just statistically feasible estimates. And in addition, the thirteen revelations found in the Doctrine and Covenants from this period may be aligned meaningfully with the distribution of this chronological data over the months of April, May, and June.

I now turn to the question of how quickly or slowly Joseph and Oliver must have been going in order to translate the total of , words in the Book of Mormon within the available days on this schedule. Is it even possible for them to have worked fast enough? The answer is yes, as shown on this multivariant graph, which mathematically shows the number of days they would have needed to work to translate the whole Book of Mormon if they went 10 words per minute, 15 words per minute, or 20 words per minute, and if they worked 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, or 8 hours per day.

About 65 days is within range.