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tiresome to read. It’s smooched from the New Testament and no credit given. It is such a pretentious affair and yet so slow, so sleepy, such an insipid mess of inspiration. It is chloroform in print.”
    But the text transported the Bible story onto the American continent, reassuring its readers that they, too lived in a Holy Land. The Lamanites lived on, Joseph preached, as American aborigines, or Native Americans. Ever hopeful of converting the ancient Lamanites and restoring them to primacy on the American continent, the Mormons generally treated the Indians with respect, far from the norm on the Mississippi frontier, or anywhere else in the country.
    In the Book of Mormon, Jesus visits America after his crucifixion. In the Gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples in Jerusalem, “And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold.” He repeats these words, and a great deal of other New Testament scripture, in two sermons to the Nephites at Bountiful, an ancient city somewhere in the Americas.
    The Book of Mormon offered proof that God was speaking to nineteenth-century Americans through his prophet Joseph Smith. While Smith and Cowdery were taking a break from translating, the two men said they encountered John the Baptist when walking in the woods alongside the Susquehanna River in Harmony. John said he would confer the power of the Old Testament priesthood upon the two men, allowing them to baptize converts. John asked them to baptize each other, and they did. Two weeks after the Book of Mormon was published, Joseph announced to his tiny flock, primarily close friends and family members, that he had assumed the title “Seer, a Translator, a Prophet, an Apostle of Jesus Christ, and Elder of the Church through the will of God the Father, and the grace of your Lord Jesus Christ” (Doctrine and Covenants 21:1). On April 6, 1830, he announced the formation of the Church of Christ, which grew within a few weeks to forty members. Converts came from evangelical Methodism, and from the followers of evangelist Alexander Campbell, who, like Joseph, was preaching a primitive Christianity, calling for a restoration of Christ’s church on earth, in anticipation of the Second Coming.
    In a series of revelations, Joseph began to assemble a rudimentary theology. Men could aspire to two successive levels of priesthood, or holy rank. Women could not. The church would be a lay church, administered by male members. There would be no professional clergy. Like many evangelical Christians, the Mormons believed they were living in the latter days of history, before the return of Christ. History was thought to be 6,000 years old, with each millennium corresponding to one day of the Genesis creation story. The upcoming seventh millennium, due in 1900, would be the “day of rest,” that is, the restoration of God’s kingdom on earth. In 1835, Joseph offhandedly remarked that “fifty-six years should wind up the scene,” implying that Christ would return to earth in 1891. The New Testament often called Christ’s followers “saints,” and Smith quickly adopted other biblical titles for his co-religionists. His lay leaders became deacons, elders, and bishops, and he eventually appointed twelve apostles from among his most loyal followers.
    In its formative years, Joseph’s church tried to distinguish itself from the roiling flotsam of wild religious euphoria sweeping the nation. Unlike many of the fiery, condemnatory evangelical creeds, his church promised near-universal salvation and taught that mortal sins are not punished forever. All persons, except a very few “sons of perdition,” could expect eternal life in one of three degrees of glory: the celestial, terrestrial, or “telestial” kingdoms. Telestial was a neologism coined for the part of heaven reserved for Gentiles and other nonbelievers.
    The Saints helped the Saints; that was a core tenet of Joseph’s religion. In response to a revelation concerning Enoch, a grandson