The Evidence

Meredith and Kendal Sheets devoted over twenty-five years to their investigation, which resulted in astonishing discoveries. They looked back almost seven hundred years to explain who really wrote the Mormon holy scriptures. The results, as you will see, are remarkable.

Below is a sample of some of the astonishing evidence they uncovered:

• The Book of Mormon claims that Jews sailed to and inhabited the Americas from the time of the Tower of Babel. Joseph Smith claimed, “The remnants are the Indians that now inhabit this country.” Smith’s stories are fabrications copied from numerous explorers, soldiers, sailors, and historians within Asia, Arabia, Europe, and ancient Mexico found in geography books and maps that were published prior to 1830. The primary source was The Travels of Marco Polo, which had versions published in 1818.
  

• Religious beliefs and doctrine of the Latter-day Saints, such as ordained polygamy, marriage of dead children, multiple gods, and spiritual ascension to become a god, were copied by Joseph Smith from the Shamanistic religion and civil practices of medieval Tartars as documented in Marco Polo. This is the reason the Mormon religion more closely resembles Eastern, not Western, traditional religious beliefs.
  

• Joseph Smith used Marco Polo as an outline to create stories, prophets, names, and numbers in The Book of Mormon. Not only are incidents alike and in the identical sequence, they are found in approximately the same place in The Travels of Marco Polo and The Book of Mormon.
  

• The Mormon holy scripture The Book of Abraham, was plagiarized from a book published in 1825 about travelers in Arabia.
  

• Joseph Smith plagiarized his famous “First Vision” of seeing God and Jesus in a forest in New York. His idea seems to have actually come from miraculous visions of a heavenly specter in an account printed in 1808. His claim of seeing a pillar of light or a pillar of fire in the sky in the First Vision was taken from a phenomenon documented in a traveler book from 1825. Smith’s heavenly visitation in his bedroom three times by an angel named Moroni to tell him about the gold plates was copied from a vision recorded in a history book printed in 1827.
  

• Joseph Smith plagiarized actual words of Marco Polo and words of the Islamic Prophet Muhammad as told by Marco Polo as if they were the Words of Jesus and God speaking to the Jews in The Book of Mormon.
  

• Joseph Smith used a Muslim chieftain’s sermons, the story of Buddha, the teachings of Tibetan Lamas, and practices of Hindus as prophets and sermons in The Book of Mormon.
  

• The land, people, buildings, and location of “Zarahemla,” where the Nephites and Lamanites lived in The Book of Mormon, are derived from descriptions of the Aztec empire of Mexico, as documented firsthand by the Spanish conquistadors, and the Tartar empire of Asia, as documented firsthand by Marco Polo.
  

• The Book of Mormon plagiarized the spread of Christianity in the Mexican Empire by Hernando Cortes and successive Spanish contingents.

• The engraved gold plates were copied from inscribed gold tablets given to Marco Polo by the Tartar emperor Kublai Khan.
  

• Smith claimed to translate “Reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphics by the “power of God” that were engraved on gold plates. He transcribed some of the hieroglyphics, which he literally copied from an 1811 travel and history book.
  

• In The Book of Mormon, Smith plagiarized Marco Polo stories of Asian Indians with dark skin as stories of God bringing a curse upon ancient Jews in America. Marco Polo said that the native people “esteemed blackness the perfection of beauty,” but Smith intentionally changed the story to say black skin was a curse from God.
  

• Joseph Smith Jr. and his father mistakenly believed elephants existed with the ancient Indians. They were fooled by historian John Ranking’s 1827 theory about the conquest of Peru and Mexico by Mongols. Ranking’s mistake became a glaring blunder in The Book of Mormon. Neither Ranking nor Smith knew that domesticated elephants never existed in ancient America and that ice-age mammoths died out in the Americas over ten thousand years ago.