Five Questions that B. H. Roberts Could Not Answer Appendix 4than painfully conscious of the fact that our means of defense, should we be vigorously attacked
along the lines of Mr. Couch’s questions, are very inadequate.’” (George D. Smith, “‘Is There Any
Way to Escape These Difficulties?’: The Book of Mormon Studies of B. H. Roberts,” Dialogue: A Journal
of Mormon Thought 17.2 [Summer 1984]: 98 (94–111).)
(^9) Roberts served as Assistant Church Historian (a priesthood calling) from 1902 until his
death in 1933. See “Church Historian and Recorder,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 13 Jun.
2011, Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 31 Jul. 2011
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Historian_and_Recorder.
(^10) DHC, 1:Preface, at VI.
(^11) Joseph Fielding Smith was the Church’s longest serving Historian (1921–1970) and later
became its 10th president (1970–1972).
(^12) These two studies, together with another book by Roberts entitled, A Parallel, a condensed
version of his larger study, remained essentially unknown until their subsequent discovery and
widespread publication by the University of Illinois Press at Urbana in 1985. In the latter, Roberts
“reflected that the imaginative Joseph Smith might have written The Book of Mormon without divine
assistance.” See also George D. Smith, Dialogue referenced in n. 8 above.
“The Disappointment of B. H. Roberts,” CephasMinistry.com, 2011, Cephas Ministry Inc., 31 Jul.
2011 http://www.cephas-library.com/mormon/mormon_b.h.roberts_disappointments.html.
“Roberts, according to Lloyd, concluded that Smith’s visions were “psychological” and that the gold
plates, “were not objective” - that is,, they didn’t really exist! They existed only on a ‘spiritual,’ or
subjective plane.”
(^13) “Roberts’s biographer, Truman Madsen, has suggested that ‘it is not clear how much of this
typewritten report [“A Book of Mormon Study”] was actually submitted to the First Presidency and
the Twelve.’ However, on 7 August 1933, the month before Roberts died, Wesley P. Lloyd recorded
his three-and-a-half hour conversation with Roberts on problems of Book of Mormon authenticity.
Lloyd had served a mission under Roberts and had come to know him well. As Lloyd recorded the
event, Roberts had sent his 400-page thesis on the origin of the Book of Mormon ‘to Pres. Grant’.”
This was apparently a “rounded number” since it had previously been reported as
containing 435 pages, according to Truman Madsen, but that most likely included the original 141
pages as well.
(^14) See B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, ed. Brigham D. Madsen, foreword by
Sterling M. McMurrin (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1992).
(^15) For example, we read: “Perhaps Benjamin Roberts [B. H. Roberts’ son] was the source of
the ‘fragments’ A. C. Lambert, a member of BYU’s faculty recalls seeing in 1925: ‘A few of us at BYU
got a few fragments of the manuscript back in 1925, but were ordered to destroy them all and to “keep
your mouths shut,” and we did keep our mouths shut.’ ...B. H. Roberts came about as near calling
Joseph Smith, Jr. a fraud and deceit as the polite language of a religious man would permit.” (Smith,
Dialogue referenced in n. 8 above, 101, n. 25.)
(^16) 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, Religious Studies Monograph Series,
vol. 7 (Salt Lake City and Provo: Bookcraft, 1982) 7–31.
(^17) “Studies of the Book of Mormon,” Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, 8 Sept. 2011,
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 11 Jan. 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_of_the_Book_of_Mormon#CITEREFRoberts1985.