19th Century Influential Texts
Adam Clarke
Haley Wilson Lemmon, a student researcher at BYU and Dr. Thomas Wayment, a professor of ancient scripture at BYU, recently documented that Joseph Smith’s translation of the Bible relies on “Clarke's Commentary: The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments, 1825” This resource was widely used by Methodist theologians and was one of the most available commentaries in the mid-1820s and 1830s in America.
The Late War
The Late War is an account of the War of 1812, published in New York in 1816. This book, written in scriptural language, was a popular resource used to teach school-aged children in America. The book reflects many similarities to the Book of Mormon:
(example: “two thousand hardy men, who ... fought freely for their country ... Now the men of war ... were ... men of dauntless courage.” - Page 35 of The Late War).
View of the Hebrews
In his 1825 book "View of the Hebrews," Rev. Ethan Smith makes the case that Native Americans are descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. This was a popular book of the nineteenth century.
The book describes a group of Hebrews who voyage across the sea to “a land of promise.”
Heaven & Hell - Emmanuel Swedenborg
Published in 1758 he reveals a detailed description of the afterlife. He expounds on the following: “There are three heavens,” described as “entirely distinct from each other.” He called the highest heaven “The Celestial Kingdom,” and stated that the inhabitants of the three heavens corresponded to the “sun, moon, and stars.” The highest level of heaven is called the Celestial kingdom, and within the Celestial kingdom are three additional degrees of glory. Those in the lower degrees of heaven, in general, cannot see the inhabitants in the higher degrees of heaven. Swedenbourg also revealed what he called Eternal Celestial Marriage, which was necessary to attain the highest level of heaven in the celestial kingdom.
The King James Bible
Historians have long recognized that the America of Joseph Smith’s day was profoundly and pervasively influenced by the King James Bible. Expanding the words of one scholar, the Bible was “so omnipresent” in the American culture of the early 1800s that “historians have as much difficulty taking cognizance of it as of the air the people breathed.”
The First Book of Napoleon
“Modern researchers have taken note of similarities between The First Book of Napoleon and other works which emulated the style of the King James Bible. Other works in the genre include The Late War, a history of the War of 1812 written in the style the King James Bible, and The Book of Mormon, a 1830 work that purports to be a pre-Columbian history of the Americas miraculously translated by Joseph Smith, which is written in the style of the King James Bible.”
Apocrypha
“The Bible that Joseph Smith worked from while engaged in his new translation of the Bible included the Apocrypha. ...shortly before Smith began his translation of the Book of Mormon, a widely publicized debate took place within the British and Foreign Bible Society over the inclusion of the apocryphal books within the Bibles it distributed. Despite the general movement of American Protestants away from the Apocrypha in the early nineteenth century, Mormons did not seem to view the Apocrypha with the same disdain….The American Bible Society decided to remove the “lost books” in 1828." (Producing Ancient Scripture, 2020).
A popular story in the Apocrypha was the story of Judith, a Jewish woman who goes into an enemy camp to meet their leader. She uses her charm to seduce the Assyrian General named Holophernes. After drinking too much wine he passed out, and Judith used a sword to cut off his head and save Israel from oppression.