Home >
Essays on Leaves Acquired from the University of Chicago

Essays on Leaves Acquired from the University of Chicago

In the twentieth century, the University of Chicago special collections processed and held in its collection two leaves from the Book of Mormon. The leaves are nonsequential. The first bears text of what is now Alma 3:5–4:2, and the second of what is now Alma 4:20–5:23. In summer 1984, the University of Chicago sold these two leaves to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Around the time of the sale, officials at both the University of Chicago and the church determined that the leaves were likely authentic pieces of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. Anomalies in the text, however, have led some to believe these leaves (referred to here as the “Chicago leaves”) are forgeries. The Chicago leaves have sometimes been associated with Mark Hofmann, who in the 1980s forged a number of documents relating to Latter-day Saint and American history, though there is no evidence that the leaves ever passed through Hofmann’s hands, nor is there any other documented connection between the leaves and the infamous forger.

Scholars disagree about the authenticity of the Chicago leaves. Because of their questioned status, the images and transcripts of the leaves are presented as an appendix in this volume. We present by way of introduction to the images and transcripts two examinations of the evidence, one written by each of the volume’s editors. With these two essays, readers and scholars may evaluate for themselves the complex history and characteristics of the Chicago leaves.

Photographs and transcripts of the leaves are presented in the same manner as in the rest of the volume.

Evidence for the Authenticity of the University of Chicago Acquisition

Robin Scott Jensen

The provenance of the leaves acquired from the University of Chicago—as well as similarities between the Chicago leaves and other leaves from the original manuscript and forensic testing performed on the leaves—strongly indicates that they are an authentic part of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. Further, textual analysis of the leaves offers important clues as to why some textual anomalies in the manuscript might exist. While some anomalies in the text raise questions about the leaves, these anomalies are explainable and do not outweigh the considerable evidence of the leaves’ authenticity.

It is unclear when or how the University of Chicago acquired the leaves, though internal university records indicate that they were likely “a gift from a noncommercial and non-professional source.”

Asked about the provenance of the leaves, Robert Rosenthal, the head of the university’s special collections in the 1980s, stated that “the document had been in [the University of Chicago’s] collection since the 1920’s.”

Rosenthal was very familiar with the leaves and had in fact taken an interest in them when he began work at the university in the 1950s. He had even tried, unsuccessfully, to determine their history prior to their acquisition by the University of Chicago.

Physical evidence supports Rosenthal’s assertion that the leaves were in the collection by the 1920s: The catalog card describing the leaves, which was created by university library staff, matches the type and format of other cards produced by the library from roughly 1923 to 1929.

The Chicago leaves had apparently been processed by special collections staff by the 1950s—a Library of Congress call number was assigned to the two leaves, and staff assigned such numbers to items in the codex manuscript collection (of which the Chicago leaves were a part) only before the 1950s.

After a theft in their collections around 1965, Chicago library staff began marking their manuscript holdings with an invisible security mark meant to be seen under ultraviolet light.

The verso of each of the Chicago leaves bears this security mark (see figure 1). The known provenance of the leaves places them firmly in the custody of the University of Chicago for much of the twentieth century.

Fig. 1. The upper right corner of page [2] of the University of Chicago leaves under visible (top) and Ultraviolet light (bottom). The “ICU” security mark added by the University of Chicago is visible only under ultraviolet light.

The physical characteristics of the Chicago leaves closely match those of other pages of the original manuscript in significant ways. The handwriting on the Chicago leaves appears to be that of , who acted as scribe for most of the original manuscript.

The two Chicago leaves measure at their largest 12¾ × 7⅛ inches. No other leaves are extant from either the gathering that would have contained the Chicago leaves or any adjacent gathering, making impossible a definitive comparison to nearby leaves. The full height of the Chicago leaves does, however, match exactly that of other known leaves from the book of Alma in the original manuscript. The width of the Chicago leaves in their original state is not determinable, since the sides of the Chicago leaves have been either trimmed or damaged. Manuscripts that underwent conservation treatment in the mid-twentieth century often had their edges trimmed.

Damage to the Chicago leaves also matches the pattern of wear on the subsequent leaves of the book of Alma in the extant pages of the original manuscript. While some portions of the leaves are better preserved than others, it appears that the manuscript as a whole sustained consistent patterns of damage while its leaves were stored together. When deposited in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, the manuscript was described as being complete, without mention of any damage. Over the decades during which it was in the cornerstone, the manuscript sustained significant damage. Some portions, such as parts of 1 Nephi, are still mostly intact, while other leaves show significant wear. Some damage appears throughout many of the gatherings and likely occurred while the manuscript leaves were all stored together. For instance, many leaves, including the Chicago leaves, are missing the upper right portion of the recto and contain a hole in the lower center portion. The patterns of damage on the Chicago leaves indicate that the leaves are authentic and were stored with the other pages of the manuscript when they were initially damaged (see figure 2). As leaves or gatherings were handed out piecemeal, those individual portions sustained their own unique damage, depending on the conditions in which they were stored or displayed. The Chicago leaves also appear to have sustained unique damage after they were separated from the rest of the manuscript. The two leaves appear to have been stored together without the missing middle leaf for enough time that fragments of the second leaf have adhered to the first leaf. A small fragment from the second leaf has somehow become attached to the verso of the first leaf, making it look as if a hole has been patched near the bottom of the first leaf.

Fig. 2. Damage to the Chicago leaves (left) mirrors the damage to later pages of Alma in the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon, such as page [271] (right).

Several years after the arrest of Mark Hofmann, Royal Skousen alerted leaders of the Church Historical Department to his belief that the Chicago leaves were forgeries. In 1989, the Church Historical Department arranged for forensic testing to evaluate the authenticity of the leaves. George J. Throckmorton, a forensic document examiner for the Salt Lake City Police Department who had been instrumental in detecting Hofmann forgeries in the mid-1980s, subjected the leaves to a battery of tests. His report was inconclusive.

On Throckmorton’s recommendation, staff at the Church Historical Department then hired Roderick J. McNeil, an analytical biochemist, to perform Scanning Auger Microscopy (SAM) on the Chicago leaves. SAM measures the ion migration of iron gall ink into the fibers of paper and compares that with measurements of contemporary documents that are known to be authentic, in order to determine when the ink was originally inscribed on the paper.

McNeil had assisted in Throckmorton’s mid-1980s investigation of Hofmann forgeries by performing SAM testing on documents suspected to be forged. Throckmorton validated McNeil’s methods with a blind test of documents; he found that McNeil’s analysis matched the known facts about every one of the documents. When McNeil analyzed the Chicago leaves in 1989, he concluded that they were inscribed in 1830, plus or minus five years. McNeil further stated that “the results from all the samples were very consistent and I’m confident that the results are accurate.” Summarizing the results of all the testing—and informed by correspondence with the University of Chicago about the leaves’ provenance—senior Church Historical Department staff member Glenn N. Rowe wrote in May 1990 that “all pieces appeared authentic.”

Provenance, physical characteristics, and forensic analysis firmly establish that the Chicago leaves are at least one hundred years old and apparently authentic. Textual analysis of the Chicago leaves raises no strong evidence of their being a forgery. In fact, some of the analysis reinforces their authenticity; a few examples will be illustrative, though more could be included. Several scribal mistakes indicate that the scribe writing on the Chicago leaves was taking dictation, rather than copying from an existing text. For instance, when Cowdery wrote “it came to not <to pass> that not many days,” it seems that he slipped and wrote what he immediately heard (“not”), failing to capture the words between “to” and “not.”

A comparison of the text of the Chicago leaves with subsequent Book of Mormon versions shows no obvious dependencies upon any subsequent text, meaning that the Chicago leaves were not copied from the printer’s manuscript, the 1830 edition, or later printed editions—all of which contain unique, identifiable variations. Finally, the scribal error rate in the Chicago leaves is similar to that in other pages of the original manuscript (roughly one misspelling per forty words), and the types of misspellings in the Chicago leaves indicate an inexperienced scribe. Several errors in the Chicago leaves are distinct from the types of mistakes that Cowdery typically made in the extant manuscript. While there are errors throughout the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon that are unique to particular portions of the manuscript, the frequency of those unique errors is higher in the Chicago leaves than in other portions of the manuscript. Without the complete manuscript, it is impossible to make definitive statements about the actual pattern of Cowdery’s scribal work throughout the original manuscript. It is clear, however, that the scribe of the Chicago leaves was inexperienced. One example of a unique misspelling is the word “Morman.” Such a misspelling is a glaring anomaly given that Cowdery otherwise spelled “Mormon” consistently throughout the extant portions of the manuscript, and some might see the error as evidence of forgery. But the historical context of the creation of the Book of Mormon offers a plausible explanation for this and several other discrepancies in the Chicago leaves that might prompt some to claim the text is too dissimilar to the rest of the manuscript.

After the loss of the initial portion of the Book of Mormon manuscript, JS resumed dictation beginning at the book of Mosiah. He dictated an unknown amount of the text of Mosiah to his wife and his brother before arrived in , Pennsylvania, in early April 1829. It is unknown at what point in the text Cowdery began taking dictation, but it is quite possible that he was still settling into his role as scribe when he inscribed Alma 3–5, the material covered in the Chicago leaves. Cowdery’s inexperience may help make sense of the spelling of “Morman.” The first instances of the proper noun “Mormon” following the loss of the initial portion of the manuscript would have been in what is now Mosiah chapters 18 (twelve instances), 25 (one instance), and 26 (one instance). The name was still relatively new, therefore, and if Cowdery began serving as scribe anywhere between Mosiah 19 and 25, the name would have been almost entirely unfamiliar to him when he got to the book of Alma. If he began somewhere between Mosiah 27 and Alma 2, the name would have been completely new to him. Since “Morman” is a reasonable phonetic spelling and since there are other instances of misspelling of proper nouns in the Book of Mormon text, such a misspelling should not, by itself, be considered as evidence the leaves are inauthentic.

The body of evidence supporting the Chicago leaves’ authenticity is at least as strong as and very often stronger than the evidence for at least one other fragment of the original manuscript that is accepted by scholars as authentic.

The provenance for the two Chicago leaves is much more solid, for instance, than the provenance of the partial leaf traceable to Ruth Smith. In that case, Smith donated a partial leaf to the church through an intermediary in 1974. Smith left no documentary evidence of how long she owned the leaf or where she acquired it. The church was not able to speak directly to Ruth Smith or her family, in contrast to the situation with the Chicago leaves, where church employees were able to correspond directly with the staff of the University of Chicago special collections. When George Throckmorton and Roderick McNeil analyzed portions of the original manuscript, they raised as many or more issues with the Ruth Smith leaf—a leaf that is considered authentic by experts on the Book of Mormon manuscript—as they did with the Chicago leaves. McNeil’s report concluded that the text on the Ruth Smith leaf was inscribed in 1834, plus or minus eighteen years, placing the Chicago leaves closer to the actual time of inscription with less uncertainty. (Ronald O. Barney, Salt Lake City, UT, to Ted L. Parke, Ogden, UT, 18 Dec. 2002, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; George J. Throckmorton, Salt Lake City, UT, to Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, ca. 30–31 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; Roderick J. McNeil to George J. Throckmorton, ca. 31 Dec. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)

Comprehensive Works Cited

Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.

Given the complexity of the relevant issues, no single category of evidence can be conclusive in establishing the authenticity of the Chicago leaves. Taken together, however, provenance, physical characteristics, forensic testing, and textual analysis strongly point to the Chicago leaves being an authentic part of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

Evidence against the Authenticity of the University of Chicago Acquisition

Royal Skousen

The main problem with the two University of Chicago leaves is that they exhibit too many unique properties, ones that are exceptional, unexpected, or out of place, either for two leaves of the original manuscript or for as scribe. In this brief description, I will list some of these unique properties. In this analysis, the symbol O stands for the original manuscript and P for the printer’s manuscript.

1. Two virtually complete leaves instead of expected fragmentation. The shape of the fragmented leaves is extraordinarily inappropriate. It explicitly follows the shape of the 96-page gathering identified as A12. As with typical fragmented leaves from gatherings, the outer leaves of A12 (both the first leaves and the last ones) have disintegrated and broken up into smaller remaining leaves and fragments. So we get only clumps of fragments for the beginning and ending of what remains of the A12 gathering. Moreover, we get disintegrated fragments for the two preceding gatherings (Alma 10:31–13:16 from A10 and Alma 19:3–20:22 from A11). And the same disintegration occurs for the gatherings following A12: we get those few leaves from the beginning of Helaman (from A13) and then large fragments in the Wilford Wood collection from the end of Helaman and smaller fragments from the beginning of 3 Nephi (in A14). Or consider the fragments from 2 Nephi and Jacob after the B2 gathering: from B3 through B6 the fragments disintegrate, and in fact they clump together according to their gatherings. And the Ether gathering A17 (from the Wilford Wood collection) disintegrates from both the front and the back of that gathering.

Overall, the remaining leaves and fragments of O show that the small plates translation was on top and best preserved for 1 Nephi, but then subsequent gatherings started to disintegrate, as shown by all the fragments after the B2 gathering (that is, after the Franklin Richards gathering that covers from 1 Nephi 14 to 2 Nephi 1). The B3 gathering includes the Ruth Smith fragment, which is without a doubt legitimate. In his examination of the Ruth Smith fragment in 1993–1994, conservator Robert Espinosa identified this fragment as having paper type A (the letter A is his identifying symbol for the paper type). The surrounding gatherings have this same paper type: from the Franklin Richards B2 gathering up through all the Wilford Wood fragments from 2 Nephi through Jacob 4 (that is, from B2 through B5, but not B6, which covers portions of Jacob 6–7 and Enos and has paper type C).

2. Imitating the fragment pattern at Alma 40–43. So how can we even get two leaves shaped like the University of Chicago leaves? There is no way that two leaves in the earlier gathering, A9, could suddenly take on the basic shape of the A12 gathering that far away unless it had been moved into A12 prior to O being placed into the Nauvoo House cornerstone. In fact, based on the size of the hole that is 8–9 lines from the bottom, the Chicago leaves (three leaves originally) would have been reversibly interleaved between page 302´ and page 307´ of A12. If this had happened, the missing upper and outer corners should match, but the corners of the Chicago leaves extend beyond the A12 pattern; that is, all the leaves in the A12 gathering have a larger missing corner than the two University of Chicago leaves. To be specific, we get the following differences for the missing upper and outer corner of each leaf:

8 pages in A12 (301´–308´)	13% of the text	lines 1–16
4 pages from Alma 3–5	8% of the text	lines 1–10

The University of Chicago leaves model the A12 ones, but they fail to represent what could have reasonably happened to these leaves from A9 as they disintegrated within the Nauvoo House cornerstone.

3. The middle leaf is missing. Another big surprise is that the middle of the three Chicago leaves is missing. All three leaves should be intact, but the second leaf is missing. Where is it? I know of no example of any group of attached fragments of O (either stuck together or sewn together) that has lost a nearly completely formed inner leaf. With the Andrew Jenson fragments, there were originally five fragments stuck together for Alma 10–13, as well as three fragments originally in the same condition for Alma 19–20. Apparently when Jenson took the Alma 10–13 clump apart, the middle third fragment disintegrated into small fragments, or somehow these disintegrated fragments stuck to the other fragments and were later removed. In any event, it does not look like Jenson saved them. On the other hand, since the two outer leaves for the Chicago acquisition are so well preserved, its middle leaf should also still exist.

4. A crowded text. There are too many lines on each page. For these University of Chicago leaves, which involve a widthwise fold of the original foolscap sheet, wrote 42 or 43 lines of text, which means that the spacing between the lines was being economized. For other pages in O with a widthwise fold and where Oliver Cowdery was the scribe, the number of lines varies from 36 in A12 to 39 in B2.

5. Trimmed leaves. The two Chicago leaves are trimmed in the gutter, up to about 1.5 cm, cutting off the text. The question is why? No other leaves or sheets of O or P have ever been trimmed. This difference, of course, cannot be assigned to , the original scribe.

6. The square notch. There is a square cut in the gutter, an unusual notch, at the beginning of line 4 on the recto of the first leaf. This cannot be the jabbed hole that would have put in the fold to stitch the gathering together. Where could this have come from?

7. A papered-over hole in the original manufactured paper. And then there is the original hole in the first leaf that resulted from when the paper was manufactured, near the bottom, centered on line 41, which was patched up by pasting over the hole a small piece of paper and then writing right across the patch. I have never seen any scribe or anyone else taking this kind of trouble to deal with paper holes (or parchment holes in manuscript books prior to printing). In contrast, on line 10 of page 42 of O, when came to writing 1 Nephi 21:1, there was a small hole in the middle of the line, and he simply skipped over the hole when he wrote the word Mother: “from the bowels of my Mo( )ther hath he made mention of my name”. For similar holes in other places in O and P, Cowdery sometimes wrote the next character above the small hole or below it, but he never made any effort to patch up the hole.

8. The earliest extant spellings for Mormon and Lamanites appear to be distinctly altered. In this document, we have the earliest extant instances of two very common Book of Mormon names, including one that occurs in the title of the book:

Mormon written twice as Morman: When we check every legitimate instance of Mormon in ’s hand, whether in O or P, we find that it is always written as Mormon, smoothly and without any shakiness or heavier ink flow (in other words, differently from these two instances of Morman in the Chicago leaves).

Lamunites and Lamun: The initial spellings for Lamanites and Laman take a u vowel for the second a. In and of itself, this is not unusual for : he sometimes writes “everlasting love” as “everlusting love”. But we do not transcribe such examples of Lamanites with a u because Oliver never overwrites these u-like a’s as u’s. But in the Chicago leaves, every sufficiently extant instance of Lamanites (all 9 of them) is spelled as Lamunites. In addition, one instance of Laman is clearly written as Lamun.

9. Too many unique misspellings. When we consider the misspellings and scribal slips in the two Chicago leaves, we find that 18 of them are strikingly different from the spelling errors found elsewhere in O and P. In the following analysis, each of the unique errors is marked with an exclamation point (!). Whenever no scribe is specified, is assumed to be the scribe. I use the following abbreviations:

OC	Oliver Cowdery 3 Oct. 1806–3 Mar. 1850. Clerk, teacher, justice of the peace, lawyer, newspaper editor. Born at Wells, Rutland Co., Vermont. Son of William Cowdery and Rebecca Fuller. Raised Congregationalist. Moved to western New York and clerked at a store, ca. 1825–1828... View Full Bio (scribe 1 of O and scribe 1 of P)
JW	John Whitmer 27 Aug. 1802–11 July 1878. Farmer, stock raiser, newspaper editor. Born in Pennsylvania. Son of Peter Whitmer Sr. and Mary Musselman. Member of German Reformed Church, Fayette, Seneca Co., New York. Baptized by Oliver Cowdery, June 1829, most likely in Seneca... View Full Bio (scribe 2 of O)
CW	Christian Whitmer 18 Jan. 1798–27 Nov. 1835. Shoemaker. Born in Pennsylvania. Son of Peter Whitmer Sr. and Mary Musselman. Married Anna (Anne) Schott, 22 Feb. 1825, at Seneca Co., New York. Ensign in New York militia, 1825. Constable of Fayette, Seneca Co., 1828–1829. Member... View Full Bio (proposed scribe 3 of O)
MH	Martin Harris 18 May 1783–10 July 1875. Farmer. Born at Easton, Albany Co., New York. Son of Nathan Harris and Rhoda Lapham. Moved with parents to area of Swift’s landing (later in Palmyra), Ontario Co., New York, 1793. Married first his first cousin Lucy Harris, 27 Mar... View Full Bio (proposed scribe 2 of P)
HS	Hyrum Smith 9 Feb. 1800–27 June 1844. Farmer, cooper. Born at Tunbridge, Orange Co., Vermont. Son of Joseph Smith Sr. and Lucy Mack. Moved to Randolph, Orange Co., 1802; back to Tunbridge, before May 1803; to Royalton, Windsor Co., Vermont, 1804; to Sharon, Windsor Co... View Full Bio (scribe 3 of P)

Franklin Richards acquisition, pages 263´ and 264´ (only 1 unique error for OC here in Alma 23–24)

concerning	comcerning	a slip: 2× in O (Alma 23:3 and Alma 47:33)
prophecies	Prophesies	9× in O, 13× in P
liveth	lieveth	2× in O (Alma 23:6, both times), 3× in P
miracles	mir[a\|u]cles	OC often writes a like u: “everlusting life” at Alma 33:23 in O
cities	Citties	1× in O (Alma 23:13), 3× in P
weapons	weopans	2× in O (Alma 23:13, both times); weopons: 26× in O, 16× in P
harden	heard[e\|o]n	hearden: 2× in O, 7× in P; heardon: 3× in O, 3× in P
whithersoever	whitheersoever	a slip: er > eer: peerhaps (Alma 52:10, in O)
cities	Cittis	a slip: es > s (plural): eys, ons, Lamanits, embassis, Nephits, bons
! curse	cures	a slip: se > es: coures [in place of course] (Alma 7:20, by MH in P)
stirred	stired	6× in O, 13× in P
anger	angar	15× in O, 1× in P
against	againts	a slip: 2× in O (Alma 24:2 and Alma 51:9), 1× in P (Ether 7:24)

Ruth Smith acquisition, pages 55 and 56 (only 1 unique error for OC here in 2 Nephi 4–5)

valley	vally	15× in O, 32× in P
plain	plane	3× in O, 8× in P
encircle	ensircle	1× in O (2 Nephi 4:33), 1× in P (Alma 48:8); ensirceled: 5× in P
stumbling	stumbleing	1× in O (2 Nephi 4:33), 6× in P
putteth	puteth	1× in O (2 Nephi 4:34), 5× in P
exceedingly	excedingly	22× in O, 71× in P
lest	least	12× in O, 11× in P
! buildings	bildings	bilding: 5× in O by CW; bildings: OC only here in 2 Nephi 5:15

Andrew Jenson acquisition, pages 228´–233´ (no unique errors here in Alma 10–13; difficult to read)

body	boddy	8× in O, 1× in P
flaming	flameing	2× in O, 3× in P
expedient	expediant	18× in O, 54× in P
preparatory	preperatory	1× in O (Alma 13:3); preperation(s): 10× in O, 21× in P

When we examine the Chicago leaves, we get too many surprises. Many of these are specifically found only in P, in either ’s or ’s hand, namely and (instead of the ampersand), humbleed, mingleeth, and reccord(s); thus one can argue that the Chicago leaves used P as a source for some of its misspellings but assigned them incorrectly to .

University of Chicago acquisition, 4 pages (18 unique exceptions)

Amlicites	Amelicites (1×)	3× in O (Alma 24:1, Alma 24:28, Alma 27:2)
! &	and (3×)	never in O or P except 2× in P when OC overwrote an aborted word; MH and HS both have and along with &
armor	armour	4× in O, 8× in P
baptize	baptise	1× in O, 19 in P
! began	bagan	0× for all scribes in O and P
body	boddy	8× in O, 1× in P
! bondage	bondge	a slip: 0× for all scribes in O and P
declare	declair	HS, 2× in P (Mosiah 29:6 and Alma 5:1); OC, declaired: 2× in O
encircle	ensercle	2× in O, 2× in P; ensercled: 4× in O; enserceled: 4× in P
encircle	insercle	1× in O (Alma 34:16); insercled: 2× in P; insercles: 1× in P
experienced	experianced	obediance: 1× in P; disobediance: 2× in O and 2× in P
! filthiness	filtheness	0× for -eness for all scribes in O and P
! foreheads	forheads	0× for all scribes in O and P
fought	faught	8× in O, 5× in P
! guilt	gilt	0× for all scribes in O and P
! have	heave	a slip: 0× for all scribes in O and P
having	haveing	23× in O, 50× in P
henceforth	hence forth	1× in O (Alma 45:17), 5× in P
! humbled	humbleed	1× by MH in P (Alma 7:3), also by MH: trampleed, dwindleed
imagine	imagion	similarly by OC: immagionations, imagionations, imagioning
! Ishmaelitish	Ishmaeliteish	a slip: 0× for all scribes in O and P for the ending -ish
! Laman	Lamun	u clearly written instead of a: 0× for all scribes in O and P
! Lamanite(s)	Lamunite(s)	u overwritten intentionally: 0× for all scribes in O and P
living	liveing	3× in O, 6× in P
! mingleth	mingleeth	1× by MH in P (Alma 3:15); also by MH: trampleeth
! Mormon	Morman	0× for all scribes in O and P (never, even as a miswriting)
! preach	spreach	a slip (blending preach and speech): 0× for all scribes in O and P
prophesy	prope{s\|c}y	a slip, ph > p by OC: propesy: 3× in O; propesies: 3× in O
! record	reccord	reccord(s): 0× for OC in O and P; 1× for MH in P, 2× for HS in P
remembrance	rememberanc	a slip, e > 0: audienc by OC in P (Ether 9:5); rememberance: 3× in O, 14× in P; rememberence: 1× in O (1 Nephi 2:24)
set	s[a\|e]t	sat instead of expected set: 5× in the earliest text
separated	seperated	1× in O, 3× in P
sought	saught	1× in O (Alma 54:13), also 3× in P by MH
! throughout	thruout	0× for all scribes in O and P; also 0× for through spelled as thru
trodden	troden	3× in O, 4× in P
view	vew	vews: 1× in P (2 Nephi 1:24)
villages	viliges	1× by OC in P (Alma 23:14); also 1× by HS in P (Alma 5:0)
whomsoever	whomesover	1× in O (Alma 36:3); also whome 1× in O and 2× in P
! words	wordrs	a slip: no similar slip for all scribes in O and P
! wrought	wraught	0× for all scribes in O and P

The Wilford Wood fragments are found on 58 pages of O, in 6 different places in the text, all in ’s hand; these fragments account for 1.87 percent of the text, yet they contain only 4 unique misspellings:

Jacob 2:13	apparrell
Jacob 7:27	obiediance (or obiedience)
Helaman 16:8	neaver
Ether 6:27	annoint (2×)

The Chicago leaves cover about 0.71 percent of the text. This means that the spelling uniqueness for the Chicago leaves is roughly 13.6 times more frequent than what we get for the Wilford Wood fragments. This is an extraordinary difference.

It is true that we have clear evidence for Oliver Cowdery learning how to spell better, but this evidence is in P rather than in O. Cowdery eventually learned to use standard spellings in P only because he was proofing the 1830 typeset sheets against his copy text, which was usually P. In O, on the other hand, we have examples of him alternating his spelling (or misspelling) for various words:

body ~ boddy

record ~ reckord

kept ~ cept

need ~ kneed ~ nead

saith ~ sayeth

led ~ lead

lest ~ least

fought ~ faught

dissent ~ desent

dissension ~ desension

anger ~ angar

angery ~ angary [in place of angry]

Yet for all of these examples, never learned how to spell these words in O. There is only one word in O that Cowdery learned how to spell, exhort (but that occurred only near the end of his scribing, in 1 Nephi 16–17, and just after had used the correct spelling, in 1 Nephi 15:25). From a statistical point of view, it is virtually impossible to claim that Oliver Cowdery reduced his exceptional misspellings in O to 1/13th the frequency in going from Alma 3–5 to Alma 10–13.

10. Too many odd scribal slips. There are additional problems with the Chicago leaves, some dealing with scribal errors that never show up elsewhere in O and P:

Alma 3:20 (on line 11 on the verso of the first leaf):

now it came to not <to pass> that not many days after

Elsewhere and other scribes in O and P never miswrite “it came to pass” in this way. Having written it came to, they write pass without fail (1,393 times). There are only 6 scribal slips involving “it came to pass”: (1) the scribe omits the to: “it came pass” (3 times); (2) the scribe omits the initial it came: “and to pass” (1 time); (3) the scribe omits to pass: “it came that” (1 time); (4) the scribe miswrites to as be: “it came be pass” (1 time). Cowdery makes all of these errors except for one instance of “it came pass”; in each of his cases he immediately corrects his error.

Alma 4:1 (on lines 36–37 on the verso of the first Chicago leaf):

Now it came to pass Chapter <II>

Now it came to pass in the six sixth year of the Reign of

There are 31 extant instances of chapter beginnings elsewhere in O, from which we can see that whenever JS came to the beginning of a new chapter in his dictation, he consistently told the scribe to write the word Chapter, and only then did JS start to dictate the text of that new chapter, which the scribe typically wrote down on a new line (29 times) but sometimes on the same line after the chapter specification (2 times, in the book of Ether). The situation here in Alma 4:1 is unique, where either JS failed to dictate the word Chapter or the scribe failed to first write down the word Chapter before starting to write down the text of the new chapter.

Alma 5:14 (on lines 11–12 on the verso of the second Chicago leaf):

have ye spirit<ual>ly been [born of Go]d

There are only 2 instances in the manuscripts where accidentally miswrote an adverb ending in -ly: (1) in O for 1 Nephi 19:2 he wrote particually in place of particularly, making a mess of the final syllable for the adjective particular; (2) in P for Moroni 10:17 he wrote severly instead of severally, skipping the al of the final syllable of the adjective several. In both these cases, we have a simple scribal slip, and in neither case did Cowdery correct his scribal slip (he may not even have noticed it). But here in Alma 5:14, the error is clearly objectionable: the -ly is directly added to the noun spirit rather than to the correct adjective spiritual, thus creating the bizarre word spiritly, which is corrected.

11. Oddly written letters. There are a large number of odd ways in which writes certain letters in the Chicago leaves, ones that are not found elsewhere in his handwriting in O and P. For instance, I note the following oddities for just the recto of the first leaf:

line 12:	unusual extra loop in the s for also (also on line 3)
line 12:	unusual e in the first the
line 19:	unusual loop on the b of bring
line 24:	second r of Rcords is unusual
line 25:	unusual the
line 26:	unusual h in the
line 27:	unusual loop on the r of or

Continuing in my transcript for the Chicago leaves, I list about 30 similar oddities for the three other pages of this document (including unusual letter forms, extra flourishes and strange swirls as well as loops on letters, and even a loop encircling a whole word). Most words may look like they are ’s, but there are also too many unusually written words. This extensive phenomenon never appears in any of Cowdery’s handwriting on other extant leaves and fragments of O.

One could propose an untested—in fact, untestable—hypothesis here: is at the beginning of his scribal work in the Chicago leaves, and consequently he is creating all kinds of exceptions and oddities as he takes down JS’s dictation. By adopting this hypothesis, one can safely ignore all the unique spellings, weird syntactic errors, and oddly written letters in the Chicago leaves, along with the crowded text. No matter the uniqueness in the handwritten text, it can be assigned to Oliver Cowdery’s beginning as a scribe and thus dismissed. In this way, we can get rid of any cases that we find inconvenient. Yet setting aside all these cases of proposed uniqueness in the Chicago leaves means that no internal textual evidence can ever disprove or call this document into question. And this allows a weak provenance to trump all contrary internal evidence from the written text itself. It is important to remember that the provenance of the University of Chicago acquisition comes down to the following fact: it was never publicly known until its discovery in the early 1980s, in the same period when numerous dubious documents (including other apparent fragments from the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon) were suddenly making their appearance. It is better to ignore this document until all these oddities can be truly explained instead of simply dismissed.

1
No leaf bearing the text of Alma 4:2–20 is known to be extant.
2
Sillitoe and Roberts, Salamander, 306–307; Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. In their 1988 history of Hofmann’s forgeries, Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts recounted that shortly after the church took possession of the Chicago leaves, Hofmann asked a cousin-in-law to supply him with money to purchase “two pages of the original Book of Mormon manuscript, housed at the University of Chicago Library.” Sillitoe and Roberts do not give a source for this information. It is unclear whether Hofmann knew the leaves had already been sold to the church. (See also Lindsey, A Gathering of Saints, 147–148.)
Sillitoe, Linda, and Allen D. Roberts. Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders. Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1988.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
Lindsey, Robert. A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and Deceit. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988.
3
“Inventory and Description of Manuscript Collection BX8623 f.A1 (No. 207 ub.),” Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; see also Rugh, Interview, 3, 7, 8, and appendix; and Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. A University of Chicago inventory and description, likely written in the 1960s, states that the donation occurred “at least a decade ago, probably much longer.” It is not uncommon, when tracking the provenance of manuscripts or rare books, for scholars to fail to find information about that item’s history before it was obtained by a repository. (“Inventory and Description of Manuscript Collection BX8623 f.A1 (No. 207 ub.),” Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
4
Glenn N. Rowe, Memorandum of telephone conversation with Robert Rosenthal, 19 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. Rosenthal further suggested that the leaves were in continuous custody at the University of Chicago. He remembered, according to Daniel Meyer, associate director of Special Collections Research Center at the University of Chicago Library, that “the two leaves of the Book of Mormon had been a part of the manuscript collections at the time he first assumed the position of Curator of Manuscripts, Archives, and Lincolniana” in the 1950s. No purchase records exist for the Chicago leaves, which suggests that they were donated to the university, though the donor’s identity is unknown. (Daniel Meyer to Robin Scott Jensen, Email messages, 24 Apr. 2010; 23 Apr. 2010, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
5
Daniel Meyer to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 24 Apr. 2010, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. Both Rosenthal and University of Chicago archivist Sem C. Sutter postulated that the leaves had been part of the Charles F. Gunther collection before coming to the university. Gunther’s vast holdings are known to have included documents from Latter-day Saint history and were acquired by various repositories after Gunther’s death in 1920. The University of Chicago actively courted Gunther before his death for the donation of his books and manuscripts. (Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; for more on Gunther, see Silvestro, “Candy Man’s Mixed Bag,” 86–99.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
Silvestro, Clement M. “The Candy Man’s Mixed Bag.” Chicago History 2, no. 2 (Fall 1972): 86–99.
6
Daniel Meyer to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 23 Apr. 2010, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. The catalog card was stored in an internal administrative file in the special collections to which only staff had access. (Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
7
Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. Though they were cataloged with the codices, these two leaves were separate, not bound together. The presentation case, however, opened like a book to reveal two sleeves of Mylar bound together—each containing one leaf. (Rugh, Interview, 7; Sem C. Sutter to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 31 July 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
8
Glenn N. Rowe, Memorandum of telephone conversation with Robert Rosenthal, 19 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL. The security mark contained the letters “ICU,” which was the code for the University of Chicago as set forth in the Library of Congress’s “National Union Catalog.” (Symbols Used in the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress, 32.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
Symbols Used in the National Union Catalog of the Library of Congress. 9th ed. Washington DC: Library of Congress, 1965.
9
Three handwriting experts from the Joseph Smith Papers Project—Robin Scott Jensen, Sharalyn D. Howcroft, and Dean C. Jessee—independently analyzed the handwriting of the leaves (Jessee in 1989 and Jensen and Howcroft in 2019), and all agreed that Cowdery was the scribe of the leaves. (Glenn N. Rowe, Memorandum of telephone conversation with Dean C. Jessee, 25 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
10
Ebenezer Robinson, “Items of Personal History of the Editor,” Return, Aug. 1890, 314–315.
The Return. Davis City, IA, 1889–1891; Richmond, MO, 1892–1893; Davis City, 1895–1896; Denver, 1898; Independence, MO, 1899–1900.
11
Royal Skousen, Provo, UT, to Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, 5 Sept. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
12
The Chicago leaves were not suspected or evaluated as forgeries during the investigation associated with Mark Hofmann’s arrest.
13
George J. Throckmorton, Salt Lake City, UT, to Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, ca. 30–31 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; for more on Throckmorton, see Turley, Victims, 212–239. According to Throckmorton, an inconclusive result should be understood as genuinely neutral, not as evidence of either authenticity or forgery. In contrast, Throckmorton and his team were able to identify clear markers of forgery or fraudulent alteration in documents associated with Mark Hofmann. (George J. Throckmorton to Robin Scott Jensen, Email message, 3 Aug. 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
Turley, Richard E., Jr. Victims: The LDS Church and the Mark Hofmann Case. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992.
14
George J. Throckmorton, Salt Lake City, UT, to Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, ca. 30–31 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; McNeil, “Scanning Auger Microscopy for Dating of Manuscript Inks,” 255–269; see also Nesměrák and Němcová, “Dating of Historical Manuscripts Using Spectrometric Methods,” 330–344. The amount of ion migration is directly proportional to the amount of time that has elapsed since the ink was first applied. The SAM procedure necessitates the removal of small samples of ink from the pages. It seems likely that the triangular and square notches on the edges of each of the leaves can be traced to this analysis.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
McNeil, Roderick J. “Scanning Auger Microscopy for Dating of Manuscript Inks.” In Archaeological Chemistry—III, edited by Joseph B. Lambert, 255–269. Vol. 205 of Advances in Chemistry. Washington DC: American Chemical Society, 1984.
Nesměrák, Karel, and Irena Němcová. “Dating of Historical Manuscripts Using Spectrometric Methods: A Mini-Review.” Analytical Letters 45, no. 4 (2012): 330–344.
15
George J. Throckmorton to Robin Scott Jensen, Email messages, 23 July 2020; 3 Aug. 2020, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
16
Roderick J. McNeil to George J. Throckmorton, ca. 31 Dec. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
17
Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, to Donald T. Schmidt, Carlingford, Australia, 8 May 1990, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
18
Cowdery also wrote “except they repent & turn of their wickedness & turn to me” and “Zarahemla that <by> the [Lamu]nites & the amelicites that there”. No such dictation errors are found in the printer’s manuscript (which was produced by copying) for these sections. (See Chicago Leaves, pp. [1] and [2].) For more on such examples of “scribal anticipations,” see Royal Skousen, “How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7 (1998): 25.
Skousen, Royal. “How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 22–31.
19
The Chicago leaves contain a total of about 1,700 words, with an error rate of 1 per 36 words. The Ruth Smith acquisition (a leaf acquired by the church in the 1970s) contains 346 words, with an error rate of 1 per 42.5 words. A leaf from the Franklin D. Richards acquisition (pages [263] and [264], which contain portions of the early part of Alma) has 470 words, with an error rate of 1 per 43.25 words.
20
See Historical Introduction to Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, circa 12 April 1828–circa 1 July 1829.
21
The provenance for the two Chicago leaves is much more solid, for instance, than the provenance of the partial leaf traceable to Ruth Smith. In that case, Smith donated a partial leaf to the church through an intermediary in 1974. Smith left no documentary evidence of how long she owned the leaf or where she acquired it. The church was not able to speak directly to Ruth Smith or her family, in contrast to the situation with the Chicago leaves, where church employees were able to correspond directly with the staff of the University of Chicago special collections. When George Throckmorton and Roderick McNeil analyzed portions of the original manuscript, they raised as many or more issues with the Ruth Smith leaf—a leaf that is considered authentic by experts on the Book of Mormon manuscript—as they did with the Chicago leaves. McNeil’s report concluded that the text on the Ruth Smith leaf was inscribed in 1834, plus or minus eighteen years, placing the Chicago leaves closer to the actual time of inscription with less uncertainty. (Ronald O. Barney, Salt Lake City, UT, to Ted L. Parke, Ogden, UT, 18 Dec. 2002, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; George J. Throckmorton, Salt Lake City, UT, to Glenn N. Rowe, Salt Lake City, UT, ca. 30–31 Oct. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL; Roderick J. McNeil to George J. Throckmorton, ca. 31 Dec. 1989, Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, CHL.)
Church History Department Information about Leaves from the Book of Mormon, 1983–2020. CHL.
22
For these gathering numbers, see Skousen, Original Manuscript, 35–36.
Skousen, Royal, ed. The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text. Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2001.
23
See plate 4 in Skousen, Original Manuscript, 42.
Skousen, Royal, ed. The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text. Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2001.
24
See plates 2 and 3 in Skousen, Original Manuscript, 40, 41.
Skousen, Royal, ed. The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text. Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, Brigham Young University, 2001.

Essays on Leaves Acquired from the University of Chicago

Request for Documents