Origin of the Book of Mormon

Adherents to the Latter Day Saint movement view the Book of Mormon as a work of divinely inspired scripture, which was written by prophets in the ancient Americas. Most adherents believe Joseph Smith's account of translating ancient golden plates inscribed by prophets. Smith preached that the angel Moroni, a prophet in the Book of Mormon, directed him in the 1820s to a hill near his home in Palmyra, New York, where the plates were buried. Several individuals besides Smith himself have stated they saw the plates, including the 11 witnesses who said they saw them in 1829. Three of those individuals also stated they were visited by an angel. Other witnesses did not say they had seen the plates but that they had observed Smith dictating parts of the text that eventually became the Book of Mormon.

There is no physical evidence that Joseph Smith actually had gold plates, while scholars who have examined the question of authorship of the text have wondered whether it was written by Smith alone or with help from an associate (such as Oliver Cowdery or Sidney Rigdon). The Book of Mormon shares a lot of text which literary analysis shows is coincident with other available literature at the time of its production such as the View of the Hebrews, the Spalding Manuscript (often seen spelled as "Spaulding"), or the King James Version of the Bible.