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Review of Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris: Owner of the First Copy of the Book of Mormon, Witness of the “Last Charge” of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City: Eborn Books, 2023). 235 pages, 67 illustrations, appendix, references, $29.00 (paperback).

Abstract: Jeffrey Bradshaw has, in a single well-researched volume, provided a gift to those interested in the lives of early Church members. In Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris, Bradshaw brings out of obscurity the remarkable life of one of Martin Harris’s brothers and illustrates the contribution of that life to the initial decades of the Restoration.





Whether you’re a descendant of Emer Harris and his son Dennison or a Church historian, Emer Harris & Dennison Lott Harris: Owner of the First Copy of the Book of Mormon, Witness of the “Last Charge” of Joseph Smith is a must-have reference book for your library.

As the title states, the book is divided into two sections—the life of Emer Harris and the witness of his youthful son Dennison. The first section is a biographical sketch that gives readers more details about Emer’s life than any other book on the market. Bradshaw has brought Emer Harris out of obscurity in an accessible and scholarly manner. He has pulled together a readable story by carefully combing source materials.

Bradshaw’s gift to masterfully create a chronological biography of Emer Harris is commendable. Without diluting the problems Emer faced, readers will learn of his hardships such as divorce, death of [Page 152]a spouse, remarriages, and poverty. More importantly, readers will discover a man who had a dogged determination to stay with his faith when it appeared there was little outward advantage to do so. The author describes Emer’s family as impoverished, in peril for their religious stance, and physically worn down. Yet none of these tribulations or others stopped Emer from following a prophet of God. He lived what Latter-day Saints call a consecrated life of devotion to the Lord. To this reviewer, this is best illustrated by his acceptance of a call to serve in the Cotton Mission in Southern Utah at age 81. Five years later, he was released at age 86. His statement, “determined to be for God & none else & with his assistance to do his will” captures the essence and purpose of his life.1

Readers will discover in his biography that Emer received the first bound copy of the Book of Mormon. It was said that his brother Martin Harris, one of the Three Witnesses of the Book of Mormon, picked up the book and presented it to him. After his conversion, Emer served an adventurous yet successful mission with Martin. Readers learn that following the mission, Emer’s woodworking skill was needed to make window sashes for the Kirtland Temple, to build the circular staircase in the Nauvoo Temple, and so much more.

What is essential information in the biography is that when his brothers Martin and Preserved Harris backed away from their religious commitments, Emer clung to his faith. Recognizing his unwavering stance, he was told in a patriarchal blessing, “[B]ecause of the integrity of thy heart, thou hast not fainted in times of dissension & persecution, when every evil thing [h]as spoken against the church of the living God, thou has endured in faith, & the Lord is well [p]leased with thee . . . because thou art alone as it were in thy father’s house; thy posterity shall be greatly blessed.”a id="footnote2anc" href="#footnote2sym" title="2. Wording and punctuation of Emer’s patriarchal blessing taken from a copy of the blessing in Bradshaw’s p...

Abstract: Moroni1’s letter in Alma 60 is not simply an angry and intemperate screed against the government; it also responds to arguments about just tactics (what modern readers would call ethics) taking place among Nephite leaders at this time. Moroni1’s letter argues for his preferred strategies of active defense and ambush, while interpreting defeat as a failure of leaders. His rhetorical strategy is particularly noteworthy for associating his Nephite opponents’ hopeful trust in the Lord with the passive resistance of the king-men, and shifting blame for defeat away from his strategies and onto his political opponents. Overall, Moroni1’s arguments exemplify sophistication and debate within Nephite thought.





[Editor’s Note: This paper is adapted from chapters 4–6 of Morgan Deane, To Stop a Slaughter: The Book of Mormon and the Just War Tradition (self-published, Venice Press, forthcoming, 2024).]





Many scholars view Moroni1’s behavior, particularly his letter to Pahoran in Alma 60, as angry and counterproductive. Grant Hardy said he was “hot blooded,” exemplifying an “aggressive posture,” a “quick temper,” a “blunt manner,” and “hasty suspicions.”1 Book of Mormon Central described Moroni1 as “angrily” writing his letter.2 Even in defending Moroni1, Duane Boyce doesn’t suggest there are [Page 136]alternative interpretations for the aggressive tone of the letter. He offers some mitigating reasons for the anger by stating that Moroni1 was constantly surrounded by danger from “beginning to end” and was misunderstood and unfairly judged by modern readers who haven’t seen constant warfare.3

There is another way to interpret Moroni1’s letter, one that moves beyond his anger at the government for its perceived malfeasance to include the larger cultural context in which he wrote. Captain Moroni1’s letter makes two arguments that reflect issues and debates during this period of Nephite history: (1) the previous Nephite practice of waiting on the Lord to deliver the people from imminent threats was dangerously passive; and (2) it was the sins of his Nephite rivals that resulted in battlefield defeat, not the sins of his soldiers who carried out his controversial strategy. A third issue may be at play as well, though it is not explicitly raised in Moroni1’s letter: the argument that ambushes are not inherently sinful. The issue of justified ambushes, as this paper argues, is an expression of the active versus passive debate prominent within the letter.

Waiting On the Lord: A Historically Passive Approach

The Book of Mormon contains many sections where readers can examine or deduce Nephite thought and strategy:



* The Lord’s reasoning that it is better that one man should perish than an entire nation dwindle in unbelief (1 Nephi 4:13) can be viewed as an authoritative and evocative example of military necessity and utilitarianism.

* Consistent with Augustine’s reasoning when he wrote that “it is a higher glory still to stay war itself with a word, than to slay men with the sword,”a id="footnote4anc" href="#footnote4sym" title="4. Augustine, “Letter 229,” NewAdvent.org, newadvent.org/fathers/1102229.htm.

Abstract: Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s speech (Alma 24:7–16) reveals multiple allusions to significant texts in Nephi’s small plates record. Thus, when he declares “I thank my God, my beloved people, that our great God has in goodness sent these our brethren, the Nephites, unto us to preach unto us,” he appears to allude to an inclusio that bookends the two books of Nephi’s small plates record which emphasizes the “goodness” of God as a theme. Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s description of his ancestors as “wicked fathers” appears to deliberately contrast Laman, Lemuel, and the sons of Ishmael with Nephi’s “goodly parents” in 1 Nephi 1:1. The name Nephi constitutes a key element in Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s own name, a name honorifically bestowed on him as a throne-name by his father. In view of the probable etymological origin of Nephi as Egyptian nfr (“good,” “goodly,” “fair”) and its evident, persistent association with “good” among the Nephites, Anti-Nephi-Lehi’s naming and the introduction to his speech deserve closer examination. This article explores the possible significance of this naming in conjunction with the Lamanites’ reception of divine “goodness” in the contexts of Nephite/Lamanite history and the Lamanite conversion narratives.





When Ammon, Aaron, and those who served with them1 taught the Lamanites the gospel of Jesus Christ and the plan of salvation, they used writings copied from the brass plates and from Nephi’s [Page 98]small plates (see Alma 18:36; 22:12–13). Mormon makes it clear that by this means Ammon, Aaron, and others redressed a longstanding, traditional Lamanite grievance against the Nephites—namely, the loss of the brass plates (see Mosiah 10:16–17; see also 2 Nephi 5:12; 10:16; Alma 20:13)—by restoring their access to the scriptures2 and thus to a knowledge of divine covenants, especially the Abrahamic covenant.

Moreover, when Ammon, Aaron, and their fellow laborers used the writings from Nephi’s small plates to teach the doctrine of Christ3 to Lamoni, Lamoni’s wife, Lamoni’s father, Lamoni’s brother (who took the name Anti-Nephi-Lehi after his conversion and likely at this coronation), and others, the Lord fulfilled his covenant with Enos for the first time (see Enos 1:11–18). That covenant included the promise that he would “bring” the Nephites records, including the small plates, “forth” to the Lamanites, in his “own due time” (Enos 1:16). While Nephi’s writings on the small plates constituted something of a political document on his right to rule,4 they had an intended broader teaching function: “they teach all men that they should do good” (2 Nephi 33:10). The Lord instructed Nephi to make the small plates with the explicit command, “thou shalt engraven many things upon them which are good in my sight, for the profit of thy people” (2 Nephi 5:30) and Nephi avers, “for their good have I written them” (2 Nephi 25:8).

Abstract: Repetition is a feature of all ancient Hebraic narrative. Modern readers may misunderstand this quality of biblical and Book of Mormon narrative. Biblical and Book of Mormon writers believed that history repeated, with what happened to the ancestors happening again to their posterity. Fawn Brodie and her acolytes misapprehend Book of Mormon narrative when—instead of at least provisionally granting that God might exist, can intervene in history, and tenaciously reenacts events from the past while the recorders of such repeated stories firmly believed in the historical reality of the narratives they recounted—they attribute such repeated stories to Joseph Smith’s imputed plagiaristic tendencies. The story of the kidnapping of the Lamanite daughters by the priests of Noah (Mosiah 20) is a recurrence of the story of the mass kidnapping of the daughters of Shiloh (Judges 21), but to attribute such similarity to plagiarism by Joseph Smith is a grand and flagrant misreading of Hebraic narrative, its persistent allusive qualities, and its repetitive historiography. Such narratives were widespread in Levantine and classical antiquity, and neither ancient historians nor modern scholars take the relationship among such analogous stories to be one of plagiarism when their antiquity is undisputed. At least one additional construal of the Book of Mormon story’s meaning needs to be explored and considered against the backdrop of Hebraic narrative.





Readers of texts are not mere passive receptacles but are active interpreters. They bring their experience, knowledge, attitudes, assumptions about the world and humans, capabilities, and all the [Page 58]previous texts they have read with them. Technical writing (say, the instructions in a manual), a romance novel, an academic source for a research paper, an article about a celebrity, a recipe, a news aggregator site, a complex work of literature such as War and Peace, a Shakespeare play, a review of a neighborhood restaurant, historical and biographical writing, a letter to the editor of a periodical: all require active involvement by the reader. But not all such reader contributions to the resulting reading are equal or equivalent. Texts require interpretation. They require appropriate assumptions, gap filling of ambiguities, judgments about genre, and experience with similar texts. Some recovery of the world created by the writer is necessary. The more recovery, the more complete the reading. Writers of texts build into their writings clues about the apt strategies to be used by the reader to decode the transaction between reader and author. Misreading those signs leads inevitably to a breakdown in that contract. Sophisticated texts call for a higher level of interpretation and greater reading skill. When a failure to communicate the storyline occurs with a complex text, the shortcoming is more likely a readerly rather than a writerly malfunction. “In works of greater complexity, the filling-in of gaps becomes much more difficult and therefore more conscious and anything but automatic.”1 One fundamental feature of Hebraic narrative such as we encounter in the Bible or the Book of Mormon requires that the reader understand the role of repetition.

Biblical narrative certainly abounds in patterns of similarity, all based on the principle of analogy. Analogy is an essentially spatial pattern, composed of at least two elements (two characters, events, strands of action, etc.) between which there is at least one point of similarity and one of dissimilarity: the similarity affords the basis for the spatial linkage and confrontation of the analogical elements, whereas the dissimilarity makes for their mutual illumination, qualification,

Abstract: There is no more important message than that of the Atonement and Resurrection of Jesus Christ. It’s life-transforming and world-transforming. It is also the most joyous news imaginable. What Jesus did on our behalf leaves us forever in his debt and should put him at the center of our lives.



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Easter Sunday,” President Russell M. Nelson declared at the commencement of his closing remarks for the April 2023 General Conference, “is the most important religious observance for followers of Jesus Christ. The main reason we celebrate Christmas is because of Easter.”1

And, truly, were it not for the events on and immediately preceding Easter—or what, with Claudia Bushman, I would personally prefer to call Resurrection Sunday2—we would have little if any reason to celebrate the birth of an obscure male Jewish peasant baby in first-century Palestine.

A traditional Easter greeting is popular throughout much of Eastern Christianity. It is often expressed in Greek, but often, too, in the local language. In Greek, it goes like this:

Χριστὸς ἀνέστη!“Khristōs anestē!”3 “Christ is risen!”

[Page 46]To which the expected response is

Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!“Alēthōs anestē!”4 “Truly, he is risen!”

Every Easter morning, I receive emails containing this greeting from friends who know Greek.

Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday commemorate the passion (suffering), the death, and the Resurrection of Jesus. They constitute what is sometimes called, in mainstream Christianity, the Holy Triduum (“three days”).

Whenever we partake of the sacrament, the events of these days should be central to our reflections. They should certainly be at the center of our thoughts on Easter Sunday.

“The fundamental principles of our religion,” Joseph Smith said, “are the testimony of the Apostles and Prophets, concerning Jesus Christ, that He died, was buried, and rose again the third day, and ascended into heaven; and all other things which pertain to our religion are only appendages to it.”5

Christ’s act on our behalf leaves us forever in his debt and should put him at the center of our lives. And eventually, even for the rebellious, it will—every knee shall bow and every tongue confess that Jesus is the Lord (Philippians 2:10–11). In scriptural language, he has redeemed us with his blood, which is to say that he has literally purchased us; he has bought our freedom from slavery to sin and the devil. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we belong to him. Speaking of the eventual impact of his impending crucifixion, the Savior prophesied:

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. (John 12:32)

So far as I am aware, though, Latter-day Saints are unique in understanding that the Atonement didn’t occ...

Abstract: To more permanently unify the Mulekites and the Nephites as a reunited kingdom of Israel, King Benjamin gathered his people at the temple, and in his role as a king and priest after the order of Melchizedek, imparted teachings that bear resemblance to the Latter-day Saint temple endowment ceremony first introduced in Nauvoo. Several of these similarities are explored in depth. Since the book of Mosiah is one of the earliest extant texts of Joseph Smith’s prophetic ministry, this finding adds to a growing body of literature that suggests that temple themes are apparent in the unfolding Restoration earlier than has been commonly recognized. King Benjamin’s sermon also provides a model for how the latter-day covenant people of the Lord can establish a modern “kingdom of priests” in preparation for the second coming of Jesus Christ.





On May 3, 1842, Joseph Smith, with the help of Lucius Scovil and others, prepared the upper room of his Red Brick Store in Nauvoo, Illinois, to represent “the interior of a temple as much as the circumstances would permit.”1 The next day, Joseph Smith invited a small number of faithful men to meet with him at the store.



On the wall was a newly painted mural. Small trees and plants stood nearby, suggesting a garden setting. Another part of the room was sectioned off with a rug hung up like a curtain. . . .





For the rest of the afternoon, the prophet introduced an ordinance to the men. . . .





The new ordinance . . . drew upon scriptural accounts of [Page 2]the Creation and the Garden of Eden . . . to guide the men step-by-step through the plan of salvation. . . .





They received knowledge that would enable them to return to the presence of God. Along the way, the men made covenants to live righteous, chaste lives and dedicate themselves to serving the Lord.





Joseph called the ordinance the endowment and trusted the men not to reveal the special knowledge they learned that day. . . . As soon as the temple was finished, both men and women would be able to receive the ordinance.2



Notably, certain elements of the endowment ceremony3 bore close resemblances to symbols and language found in Masonic rituals, a connection that was observed by participants at the time. For example, one of the first men to receive the endowment, Master Mason Heber C. Kimball,



wrote of this experience to fellow Apostle Parley P. Pratt, who was on a mission in England. “We have received some precious things through the Prophet on the priesthood,” Kimball wrote of the endowment, noting that “there is a similarity of priesthood in masonry.” He told Pratt that Joseph believed Masonry was “taken from priesthood but has become degenerated.”a id="footnote4anc" href="#footnote4sym" title="4. “Masonry,” Church History Topics, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,