"Stand Forever" Ep. 32 | The Truth—Was Joseph Smith A Prophet? Part II | Elder Lawrence E. Corbridge

Pick almost any scripture from the Book of Mormon, the Doctrine and Covenants, and the Pearl of Great Price, and ask yourself if they read like the words of deceit, lunacy, or God. Joseph Smith said, “…that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than any other book.” Following the three-month period of translation between April and June 1829, Joseph Smith produced the manuscript of what would be printed and published the following year as the Book of Mormon, a book of over 500 printed pages. And not just any book—a book dictated in a continuous stream without notes, books, or reference materials, with layers upon layers of complexity. How does an uneducated young man produce a complicated narration of multiple literary structures and styles, a web of hundreds of chronological and geographical references, multiple discernible authorship styles, hundreds of authorship shifts, language patterns and idioms of the Near East, and also fill the scores of gaps of truth missing from the Bible all in a continuous, unassisted, unedited flow of dictation in 60 days? The Book of Mormon appearing on the scene within two months, containing what it contains, does not happen in the ordinary course of events without the intervention of a higher power. The Book of Mormon speaks for itself.