View of the Hebrews
The claim:
"There was a book published in 1823 Vermont entitled View of the Hebrews. . . . [34-item parallel chart] . . . Oliver Cowdery -- also a Poultney, Vermont resident -- was a member of Ethan's congregation during this time."[1]
"While this does not prove that the Book of Mormon was plagiarized from the View of the Hebrews, it does demonstrate that key elements of the story of the Book of Mormon -- i.e. Native Americans as Hebrew descendants, ancient records of natives preserved, scattering and gathering of Israel, Hebrew origin of Native American language, etc. pre-dated the Book of Mormon and were already among the ideas circulating among New England protestant Americans."[2]
Behind the technical wording, the argument is simple. A New England minister named Ethan Smith published a book called View of the Hebrews in 1823, nine years before the Book of Mormon. It argued that Native Americans were descended from the lost tribes of Israel. The CES Letter lays a chart of thirty-four "parallels" between that book and the Book of Mormon side by side, notes that Joseph Smith's future scribe Oliver Cowdery lived in the same Vermont town as Ethan Smith, and lets the reader draw the obvious conclusion: Joseph borrowed his book from Ethan's.
The idea that the Indians were Israelites really was in the air in Joseph Smith's America. But set the two books side by side and read what they actually say, and the borrowing story collapses, then reverses on itself. The Book of Mormon disagrees with View of the Hebrews on almost every specific point a copier would have kept, and it leaves out the one piece of "evidence" Ethan Smith cared about most.
One fact frames the whole question. In 1996, Brigham Young University reprinted View of the Hebrews in full, with a scholarly introduction that hands the reader both texts and invites a line-by-line comparison.[3] That is a strange thing to do with a book you are supposed to be hiding.
The theme really was in the air
Ethan Smith did not invent the idea that the Indians were Israelites, and the Book of Mormon was not the first book to play with it. The notion had been circulating in English for almost two centuries before either was printed. Thomas Thorowgood argued it in London in 1650. James Adair filled hundreds of pages with supposed Hebrew-Indian parallels in 1775. Elias Boudinot, a former president of the Continental Congress, published the same thesis in 1816, seven years before View of the Hebrews. Cotton Mather, William Penn, and Roger Williams had all touched it earlier.[4]
That history matters because it quietly changes what the CES Letter's chart is even comparing. It is not really lining up View of the Hebrews against the Book of Mormon. It is lining up the standard nineteenth-century assumptions about where the Indians came from, ideas you could find in a dozen books, against a scripture that engages the same biblical themes those assumptions grew out of. The chart never explains why Ethan Smith, rather than Adair or Boudinot or any of the others, should be tagged as the source. Nothing singles him out except that someone, long after the fact, decided to build a list around his book.
The chart is built to hide the differences
A chart of thirty-four checkmarks in two columns feels overwhelming before you have examined a single item, and that overwhelm is doing most of the persuading. Look closely and the impression comes apart in three ways.
First, the chart pads its count by splitting one shared idea into many rows. Grant the single premise that ancient Hebrews came to the Americas, and a whole stack of "parallels" follows automatically: the destruction of Jerusalem, the scattering of Israel, the gathering of the lost tribes, a long migration, crossing many waters, and so on. Those are not nine separate matches. They are nine restatements of one idea, the same biblical story of Israel's scattering that both books are drawing from.
Second, a checkmark hides what is actually being compared. The chart marks "destruction of Jerusalem" in both columns. What it does not tell you is that View of the Hebrews is talking about the Roman destruction in A.D. 70, while the Book of Mormon is talking about the Babylonian destruction in 586 B.C. Different armies, different centuries, six hundred years apart. The checkmark flattens all of that into a tidy match.
Third, the one detailed parallel the CES Letter actually annotates dissolves the second you trace it. Both books describe a man standing on a wall, crying woe to the city, who is then attacked: Samuel the Lamanite in the Book of Mormon, and a figure named Jesus son of Ananus in View of the Hebrews. It sounds specific until you notice that Ethan Smith did not write that story. He lifted it straight out of Josephus, the ancient Jewish historian whose works sat in countless American homes.[5] So the "parallel," at most, is between the Book of Mormon and a famous ancient narrative anyone could have known, not between the Book of Mormon and anything original to Ethan Smith. There are other items on the chart, and the in-depth version walks through them, but they all share this shape: broad where they look specific, and borrowed from a common well rather than from each other.
Where the two books actually disagree
The criticism only ever shows you half the comparison. The CES Letter gives you the parallels and stops there. It never shows you the differences, and the differences are not small footnotes. They are the load-bearing claims of Ethan Smith's book, and the Book of Mormon contradicts them one after another.
John Welch catalogued more than eighty specific points where the Book of Mormon departs from or flatly reverses View of the Hebrews.[6] A few are enough to show the pattern. Ethan Smith has the migrants walk overland across the Bering Strait; the Book of Mormon puts them on a ship across the ocean. Ethan Smith has them settle north to south; the Book of Mormon runs south to north. Ethan Smith's heroes keep parchment records; the Book of Mormon's keep gold plates. Ethan Smith makes Moses the central figure; the Book of Mormon makes Jesus Christ the center and never mentions the Moses-figure Ethan Smith spends pages on.
Three of these are worth slowing down on, because they are not the kind of thing a copier changes by accident. He goes out of his way to reject them.
Ethan Smith's single strongest piece of evidence is that Native Americans practiced circumcision, which to him proved Hebrew descent. A borrower quietly building the same case would have kept it. The Book of Mormon does the opposite: it declares outright that "the law of circumcision is done away" (Moroni 8:8). Ethan Smith's entire thesis is that the Indians are the lost ten tribes. The Book of Mormon goes out of its way to say they are not. The risen Christ tells the people in 3 Nephi that the ten tribes are somewhere else, "other sheep" he must still visit, separate from the very people he is standing among. And the chapter Ethan Smith treats as the keystone of his whole argument, Isaiah 18, the one he names right on his title page, is completely absent from the Book of Mormon, even though the Book of Mormon quotes more of Isaiah than almost any other source and reproduces whole chapters of it.[6:1]
Stop and feel the weight of that last one. If you were borrowing from a book, the first thing you would reach for is its best argument. The Book of Mormon quotes Isaiah at length, page after page, and pointedly skips the exact chapter its alleged source built everything on. The non-LDS literary scholar Gregory Dundas put the whole pattern bluntly: a Joseph Smith actively plagiarizing View of the Hebrews "would have required 'superhuman restraint' to ignore 99 percent of [Ethan] Smith's details" while contradicting the ones that mattered most.[7] The in-depth version lays out the full list and the comparison table.
The two facts the case rests on both fail
Underneath the chart, the CES Letter offers two hard claims that sound like documented history. Both fall apart on examination.
The first is that Oliver Cowdery "was a member of Ethan's congregation." Larry Morris went through the surviving Poultney church records, town records, and the Cowdery family's residence papers.[8] The timing simply does not work. Every documented contact between the Cowdery family and that church (1803, 1810, 1818) happened under a different minister, Reverend Leonard. Ethan Smith did not arrive in Poultney until 1821, three years after the most recent of those contacts. By the time View of the Hebrews was published in 1823, the family had already moved to New York. There is no record placing Oliver in Ethan Smith's congregation at all, and Oliver did not even meet Joseph until 1829. The "direct link" is an assertion the documents do not support. Could Oliver have heard of a local minister's book another way? Possibly. But "possibly" is not "was a member," and the in-depth version walks through why even the softer version struggles.
The second claim is the most consequential, and it backfires the hardest. The CES Letter leans heavily on B.H. Roberts, an early-twentieth-century Church leader and historian, quoting a passage where he describes the "cumulative force" of the parallels. The clear implication is that this respected insider concluded the Book of Mormon was a fraud.
He concluded no such thing. In the 1920s Roberts wrote up the strongest possible case against the Book of Mormon, on purpose, so that Church leaders could prepare missionaries to answer it. He said so in plain words in his own cover letter, which the CES Letter never quotes: "What is herein set forth does not represent any conclusions of mine."[9] He called the document "awful," a "scissors and paste compilation," and added, "I am taking the position that our faith is not only unshaken but unshakeable in the Book of Mormon."[9:1] He was a lawyer building the prosecution's brief so his own side could rebut it, not a man confessing.
And he never stopped affirming the book. Across the very years in question he defended the Book of Mormon in general conference, declared at the 1930 Church centennial that it was revealed "by the power of God," and in the last conference address of his life called it "one of the most valuable books that has ever been preserved."[9:2] A friend recorded him saying, weeks before his death, that "Ethan Smith played no part in the formation of the Book of Mormon."[9:3] The CES Letter conscripts Roberts as its star witness. Read in full, he testifies for the other side. The in-depth version traces his testimony year by year.
Even outside scholars see two separate books
You do not have to take a believer's word for any of this. The scholars who have looked hardest at the question, including ones with no stake in the Church being true, keep arriving at the same place.
Elizabeth Fenton, an English professor at the University of Vermont with no Latter-day Saint connection, wrote the most sustained recent academic study of how the two books relate. Her finding is striking: the Book of Mormon "does not present the lost tribes of Israel as the ancestors of American peoples and is in fact explicit in its rejection of that theory."[10] That is the exact reverse of Ethan Smith's central claim. In her telling, the Book of Mormon did not extend the Indians-as-Israelites theory; it helped kill it off. Richard Bushman, the leading academic historian of early Mormonism, reached the same verdict decades earlier in a book from a secular university press: "Nor is there evidence of heavy borrowing from View of the Hebrews, as some critics have said."[11] Two scholars, different faiths, different fields, converging independently on the same answer. The in-depth version covers their work in full.
The subtler version of the charge
The chart and the two facts are easy to take apart. The strongest version of this criticism is harder, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a victory lap.
That stronger version drops the word "plagiarism" entirely. It says: never mind whether Joseph held View of the Hebrews in his hands. He grew up soaking in a culture saturated with the idea that the Indians were Israelites, and View of the Hebrews is just the clearest single book expressing that culture. On this reading, the Book of Mormon is a creative product of its environment.
The theme genuinely was widespread. The faithful case cannot wave that away, and its weakest move is the old line that "a borrower would surely have included the strongest evidence," because a clever author might have left things out for his own reasons. So the environmental thesis does explain the broad, fuzzy overlap between the two books.
What it cannot explain is everything underneath the overlap. If Joseph were channeling his environment, the book should echo that environment's assumptions. Instead it contradicts them at nearly every specific turn, as we have seen, and it omits the very evidence a nineteenth-century author would have found most useful. And it contains things that environment could not have supplied at all. The clearest is Nahom: the Book of Mormon names a place along Lehi's route through Arabia where Ishmael was buried, and in 1988 archaeologists in Yemen dug up ancient altars carved with that very tribal name, NHM, dating to roughly Lehi's lifetime.[12] View of the Hebrews is a book about the Americas. It has nothing to say about Arabia, and it certainly could not have planted a real place-name in the Yemeni desert. The environmental thesis answers the easy half of the data and goes silent on the hard half.
The borrowing runs the other way
Boil it all down and the CES Letter is right about exactly one thing: both books talk about Hebrews coming to the Americas. So did Adair, Boudinot, Priest, Thorowgood, and a long line of writers stretching back almost two hundred years before Ethan Smith. The theme was never in dispute. It was already everywhere. The real question was always whether this book produced that one, and the evidence points the other way. Borrowing means following your source, and the Book of Mormon walks away from Ethan Smith at every turn that matters: the migration route, the direction of settlement, the central figure, the record, the lost tribes, the keystone chapter. It drops his best evidence and carries details from the other side of the world he never knew.
And remember what the Book of Mormon is. It was dictated out loud, start to finish, in roughly sixty working days, around 269,000 words, with no notes and no rewriting of earlier chapters as later ones came.[13] The theory on offer asks us to believe that a man did that by stitching together a theological essay he contradicts at every turn. The closest scholars, believing and not, keep reaching the simpler reading: the Book of Mormon did not repackage View of the Hebrews. Point for point, it answered it and overturned it.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 8, pp. 16–20. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 8, p. 21. ↩︎
Charles D. Tate Jr., "Introduction," in Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1996). https://rsc.byu.edu/view-hebrews/introduction ↩︎
Stephen D. Ricks, review of The Use of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon by Wesley P. Walters, FARMS Review of Books 4, no. 1 (1992): 235–250. See also Scripture Central KnoWhy #502, "Is the Book of Mormon Like Any Other Nineteenth Century Book?" https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/is-the-book-of-mormon-like-any-other-nineteenth-century-book ↩︎
Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, 6.5.3. View of the Hebrews quotes this passage directly from Josephus; the wall-preacher narrative is not original to Ethan Smith. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "View of the Hebrews: 'An Unparallel,'" in Reexploring the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: FARMS, 1992), 83–87. Originally published as FARMS Preliminary Report W-85 (1985). https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/welch/2015-10-28/22_view_of_the_hebrews_83-87.pdf. See also B.H. Roberts Foundation, "John W. Welch lists a variety of unparallels between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon," https://bhroberts.org/records/gzzHJd-03DB4J/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Gregory Steven Dundas, Explaining Mormonism (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2022), ch. 6, pp. 204–211. Dundas writes from a "believing skeptic" methodological position rather than as a partisan apologist. https://wipfandstock.com/9781666741834/explaining-mormonism/ ↩︎
Larry E. Morris, "Oliver Cowdery's Vermont Years and the Origins of Mormonism," BYU Studies 39, no. 1 (2000). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/byusq/vol39/iss1/7/ ↩︎
Truman G. Madsen, "B.H. Roberts and the Book of Mormon," in Book of Mormon Authorship: New Light on Ancient Origins, ed. Noel B. Reynolds (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1982), 7–32. https://rsc.byu.edu/book-mormon-authorship/b-h-roberts-book-mormon ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Elizabeth Fenton, "Nephites and Israelites: The Book of Mormon and the Hebraic Indian Theory," in Americanist Approaches to the Book of Mormon, ed. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 277–297. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/americanist-approaches-to-the-book-of-mormon-9780190221928 ↩︎
Richard Lyman Bushman, Joseph Smith and the Beginnings of Mormonism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 134–139. Bushman's analysis spans six pages of sustained engagement with the View of the Hebrews dependence question. See also B.H. Roberts Foundation, "Richard Lyman Bushman reviews the controversy surrounding View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon," https://bhroberts.org/records/jpNwrg-9hCb4h/ ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2012): 79–98. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-history-of-nahom/. Aston documents the 1988 German archaeological discovery of the first NHM altar at the Bar'an Temple, Marib, Yemen, and S. Kent Brown's 1999 LDS scholarly identification linking the inscription to the Book of Mormon's Nahom. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 11–50. https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/welch/2020-01-13/john_w._welch_byus_57.4._timing_the_translation_of_the_book_of_mormon_2018.pdf ↩︎