Feb 10 2020 69 mins 50
Don Bradley is an author and independent historian specializing in the beginnings of the Latter-day Saint Restoration. He completed a Bachelor’s in History at BYU and a Master’s in History at Utah State University, where he wrote his thesis on “American Proto-Zionism and the ‘Book of Lehi’: Recontextualizing the Rise of Mormonism.” Don has performed an internship with the Joseph Smith Papers Project working with the earliest Joseph Smith sources. He was the primary researcher for Brian C. Hales’s Joseph Smith’s Polygamy series. He has published on the translation of the Book of Mormon, plural marriage before Nauvoo, Joseph Smith’s “grand fundamental principles of Mormonism,” and the Kinderhook plates, and has forthcoming works on the Kinderhook plates and the First Vision. He lives in Springville, Utah. Don Bradley presents over a decade of historical and scriptural research to not only tell the story of the lost pages but to reconstruct many of the detailed stories written on them. Questions explored and answered include: Was the lost manuscript actually 116 pages? How did Mormon’s abridgment of this period differ from the accounts in Nephi’s small plates? Where did the brass plates and Laban’s sword come from? How did Lehi’s family and their descendants live the Law of Moses without the temple and Aaronic priesthood? How did the Liahona operate? Despite the likely demise of those pages to the sands of time, the answers to these questions and many more are now available for the first time in nearly two centuries in The Lost 116 Pages: Reconstructing the Book of Mormon’s Missing Stories.
