One of the best-known features of the Book of Mormon is its identification of the authors of all its parts, from the Title Page, opening header, and 1 Nephi 1:1 to the very last chapter of Moroni, the last book in the Book of Mormon. Three main authors are named (Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni), along with eight authors of short texts following the books attributed to Nephi.
The explicitness with which the Book of Mormon identifies its authors contrasts to much of the Bible. Biblical authors rarely identify themselves by name as the authors of their books, and with one possible, partial exception none of the authors of its historical books does so:
- The Pentateuch contains a few references to Moses as writing (Exod. 17:14; 24:4; 34:27; Num. 33:2), including statements attributing “the book of the law” in Deuteronomy to Moses (Deut. 28:58, 61; 29:20–21, 27; 30:10; 31:9, 22, 24, 26), but none of these statements identifies him as the author of the Pentateuch as a whole.
- The historical books from Joshua through 2 Chronicles are entirely silent about their authors, as are the books of Esther and Job.
- The book of Nehemiah is at least based largely on his own records or memoirs, but it is unclear who wrote it along with the book of Ezra (perhaps Nehemiah or an associate). Nehemiah is the Old Testament book that comes closest to being a first-person narrative, but even the book of Nehemiah lacks any explicit identification of its author or description of how the book came to be written.
The anonymity of most of the Old Testament writings is consistent with the general practice of ancient Near Eastern culture, as one biblical scholar has explained:
Why are we so concerned with who wrote the Bible? That question did not become important until after the rise of Greek civilization in the fourth century B.C.E.—well after most of the books of the Bible had been written. In contrast, the importance of authorship was largely an unknown concept in the ancient Semitic world. The famous Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, the Babylonian creation myth known as The Enuma Elish, the Egyptian tale The Shipwrecked Sailor, and the Canaanite epic literary account of the battle between the gods, Baal and Mot, have no authors. They have scribes who pass along the tradition.1
The narrative books of the New Testament are also lacking in explicit identification of their authors. The four Gospels do not identify their authors by name. The Gospels of Luke and John each have just one authorial first-person statement of any kind (Luke 1:3; John 21:25). The Gospels of Matthew and Mark have no such statements at all. The Book of Acts also has one authorial first-person statement, but again without any use of the author’s name (Acts 1:1).
It is in non-narrative books of the Bible that one finds some information about authors. In the Old Testament wisdom literature, David is identified as the author of many of the Psalms, and Solomon is identified as the author of Ecclesiastes and the Song of Songs and as the compiler of many of the proverbs in the Book of Proverbs. Generally speaking, the books of the prophets are understood to be authored by the prophets whose names they bear, but this is made explicit only for the books of Jeremiah (25:13; 30:2; 36:2–18, 32; 45:1; 51:60), Nahum (1:1), and Daniel (12:4–5). The book of Daniel is the only Old Testament book containing authorial self-naming statements: “I, Daniel” (Dan. 7:15; 8:15, 27; 9:2; 10:2, 7; 12:5) and “me, Daniel” (Dan. 7:28; 8:1). On the traditional, conservative date, the book of Daniel was written in the second half of the sixth century BC, after Lehi and his family had left the Middle East. And again, Daniel’s self-naming statements do not come in historical narrative (which is the dominant genre of Daniel 1–6) but in accounts of his visions (which dominate Daniel 7–12).
In the New Testament, all of the epistles except Hebrews (which ends like an epistle but otherwise does not look like one) identifies its author by name, as does Revelation, which is attributed to John. Revelation, of course, is a book of visions much like those of Daniel, and Revelation contains three self-naming statements by the author John (Rev. 1:9; 21:2, 8). There are also eight self-naming statements by Paul (“I, Paul”) scattered among his thirteen epistles (1 Cor. 16:21; 2 Cor. 10:1; Gal. 5:2; Eph. 3:1; Col. 1:23; 4:18; 1 Thess. 2:18; Philem. 19).
It is actually quite plausible that Joseph Smith’s dictation of the Book of Mormon was influenced by the use of self-naming statements in Paul and Revelation. There are over fifty clear uses of Paul’s writings and twenty clear uses of Revelation in the Book of Mormon (e.g., 1 Cor. 12:4–11 in Moroni 10:8–17; 1 Cor. 13:3–13 in Moroni 7:44–46; Rev. 17:1–6 in 1 Nephi 13:1–7).
Some LDS scholars have acknowledged that the explicitness and emphasis in the Book of Mormon with regard to identifying its authors by name is out of sync with the narrative books of the Bible. Terryl Givens, for example, notes with regard to the opening books of Nephi that the “emphatic insistence on the literal origins of the record at Nephi’s own hand…is unlike the impersonal voice with which Genesis opens the biblical account of creation…. It is a beginning also strikingly unlike the gospels of the New Testament.”2
From a believing LDS perspective, the “plainness” with which the Book of Mormon identifies its authors is a reassuring feature. However, from an historical perspective, these internal references to the authors of the various books within the Book of Mormon are inconsistent with them having been written by people of ancient Israelite, or even broadly of ancient Near Eastern, cultural origin. What may seem like a feature is from this perspective actually a bug.
1. William M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book: The Textualization of Ancient Israel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7.
2. Terryl L. Givens, The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 7.