The Spalding Theory — by Lester Bush
Lester Bush wrote a detailed article concerning the Spalding theory (The Spalding Theory Then and Now), which deals with a decades-long belief by some that the Book of Mormon was actually a poorly-disguised plagiarism of a book written by Solomon Spaulding about the early inhabitants of the American continents. Bush’s article debunks many of the untruths concerning this belief. I have reproduced below the last paragraph of his well-researched article.
“While for the past thirty years the Spalding theory has been a dead issue, it has never truly disappeared. The very imprecision of the original argument, so integrally tied to the eventual abandonment of the theory by scholars of Mormonism, has served to assure its preservation. However high the possibilities, no one has ever been able to ‘prove’ in any absolute sense that the Hurlbut affidavits were erroneous recollections, deliberate or otherwise. Superficial analyses, shaped largely by an a priori assumption that Joseph Smith was incapable of producing the Book of Mormon Alone, will no doubt continue to find ‘hard evidence’ in the persisting trace of uncertainty, and carry the Spalding corpus perpetually onward. So long as the subject remains a not-quite-solved historical problem, this will probably ever be so. One therefore can reasonably expect that new variants will, like the influenza, reemerge every now and then. The strength of these will probably be, as in the most recent instance, inversely proportionate to the publicity with which they are heralded. One newspaper recently headlined this latest episode, “BOOK OF MORMONS’ AUTHENTICITY DOUBTED BY HANDWRITING EXPERTS”. More aptly the title could have been, “THE LATE REVEREND SPALDING DISINTERRED…BUT SLATED FOR REBURIAL SOON”.
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