The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ

Throughout The Book of Mormon, reference is made to the “sacred records,” which are usually identified as the Plates of Nephi (though other, more minor records, also appear in the texts). The Plates of Nephi thus form a motif that carries through from one end of The Book of Mormon to the other, from the initial description of Nephi’s record-keeping in the sixth century BCE to the burying of the plates by Mormon and his son Moroni in the fourth and fifth centuries CE. As regards the Plates of Nephi, two sets are indicated by the text: the Small Plates and the Large Plates. The Small Plates record the early history of the Nephites, from 1 Nephi through the Book of Omni. According to Joseph Smith’s account of the text’s creation, these were intended as a complementary account to the Large Plates, but became the primary source material for the opening books of The Book of Mormon after Smith’s original translation of the first section of the Large Plates was lost (see the Authorial Context entry in the Background section above). The Large Plates contain the entire arc of Nephite history, being continuously maintained by record-keepers until the fourth century CE, at which time the prophet Mormon produces an abridgement of them on gold plates.