Covering Up the Book of Mormon’s Black Hole
What happened to the 116 missing pages of the Book of Mormon?
In this episode of Mormon News Roundup, we investigate one of the most fascinating textual mysteries surrounding the origins of Mormonism: the disappearance of the original manuscript, Joseph Smith’s claimed divine solution, and the striking differences researchers find in the replacement text.
In 1828, Martin Harris lost 116 pages of the Book of Mormon manuscript. Rather than retranslate the missing material, Joseph Smith claimed that God had prepared another ancient record—the Small Plates of Nephi—to replace it.
But there’s a problem.
The replacement text covers roughly the same historical period as the missing pages while containing remarkably little of the detailed historical information found elsewhere in the Book of Mormon. Names, geographical directions, measurements, military details, and other concrete identifiers become unusually scarce.
This has led some critics and textual researchers to propose what has been called the “Black Hole” theory: that the unusual vagueness of the replacement narrative may have helped prevent contradictions with the lost manuscript if it were ever recovered.
We also examine a particularly intriguing textual problem involving the name “Jesus Christ.” The name appears in the portion of the Book of Mormon dictated later, even though an important revelation concerning that name supposedly occurs much later in the chronological narrative. Later editions changed the wording from “Jesus Christ” to “the Messiah.”
Was this a divine workaround designed to solve an impossible problem?
Or does the structure of the replacement text provide clues that Joseph Smith was reconstructing an earlier portion of the story after the rest of the Book of Mormon had already been dictated?
The missing pages are gone—but the textual evidence they left behind may still tell us something.
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