In his day Brigham H. Roberts (1857- 1933) occupied important ecclesiastical positions in the Mormon heirarchy and was a highly influential church historian and theologian. At the time of his death he was widely acknowledged both within and without the church as Mormonism's most eminent scholar and intellectual spokesman. Among his prime characteristics were a deep commitment to intellectual integrity in his scholarly work (which occasionally troubled some of his ecclesiastical colleagues) and an abiding determination to establish Mormonism's beliefs and truth claims on a rational basis. Roberts took his unoffical status as chief defender of the faith with the utmost seriousness. He was convinced that modem Mormon youth would demand honest answers to criticism of their faith, consistent with secular knowledge, and was resolved not to permit his religion to become an object of ridicule to modern scientific thought.

Intended primarily for the consumption and reaction of his ecclesiastical peers among the general authorities of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the present work under review was first written by Roberts in the 1920s as a set of unpublished manuscripts formulating problems associated with the Book of Mormon. The original manuscripts have been kept in the possession of the Roberts family until recently when they were given, along with other Roberts papers, to the Special Collections Department of the University of Utah Library with permission to edit and annotate for publication.

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The intriguing thing about these particular Roberts manuscripts is that, taken at face value, they constitute a singularly forceful challenge to Book of Mormon authenticity. In the apparent role of devil's advocate, Roberts marshalled one of the most thorough and systematic critiques of the Book of Mormon that has yet been written. Ostensibly done in order to anticipate the objections of non-Mormon scholars, stimulate serious thinking within the church, and with initial confidence that reasonable answers could be given to all such lines of questioning, Roberts opened a Pandora's box of problems that neither he nor other Mormon authorities at the time could solve satisfactorily.

Roberts' critique is based on a presentation of both external and internal evidence against the plausibility of the Book of Mormon. In his first essay Roberts utilizes the available scholarship of his day to examine the linguistic forms, cultural artifacts, and racial origins of the pre-Columbian peoples of North and South America—all of which reveal dramatic discrepancies with Book of Mormon claims. In a subsequent essay Roberts considers the evidence that Joseph Smith himself wrote the Book of Mormon and concludes that in spite of Smith's youth and lack of education, there are reasonable grounds for such a thesis. Roberts shows that theories of the Hebrew origin of American Indians were "common knowledge" in Smith's time and in particular argues that Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, an early nineteenth-century work of considerable public notoriety that advances this theme, was readily available to the Mormon prophet as a youth, years prior to the writing of the Book of Mormon. Roberts identifies numerous parallels of content between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon and concedes that it is quite conceivable that the former could have formed the "ground plan" or thematic structure of the latter, as well as providing details of American antiquities that could have been incorporated by a mind as imaginatively powerful as Joseph Smith's into the complex narrative of the Book of Mormon. Finally, Roberts renders a rather scathing critique of various stylistic absurdities and internal inconsistencies in the Book of Mormon that point to a creative but naive and amateurish author.

The publication of Roberts' manuscripts in this book should be of considerable interest to Mormon scholars, especially those with a stake in either defending or discrediting the Mormon Church. Contemporary Mormon apologists will undoubtedly argue that in spite of these heuristically critical investigations, Roberts' personal faith in the Book of Mormon remained firm and that many of the problems he propounded have been adequately addressed by subsequent generations of Mormon scholars. Whether or not this is the case should provide fuel for a new round of debate within the church (which in recent years has been fending off attacks against the Book of Mormon from a variety of sources).