Transcript

Brandon Metcalf is here as one of our church historians, and I asked him to show you some historical documents. Earlier in our conversation, we spoke about the Book of Commandments, which those two young ladies saved for us. Well, one of those girls was given a copy of that book by Oliver Cowdery. It's called the Book of Commandments. They were going to sell them for about $0.25 to $0.50 apiece, but they never got published except for those that were rescued from that destruction of the printing press. Brandon Metcalf, our church historian, has a copy of that book in his hand. It is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars if it were for sale, maybe even millions, I don't know. That's right. How can you put a price on something when nobody will buy it and we won't sell it? That's exactly right. Please. And this is a special copy. This is the copy that belonged to Oliver Cowdery that came to the Church through his descendants. And this was the copy that they actually kept in the printing office later on in Kirtland as they were preparing to publish the Doctrine and Covenants. So President, you can see in the front there, it has Oliver Cowdery and Joseph Smith's name written in there as a printing office copy. So this is a very valuable document, the Book of Commandments. Very few survived, as the Nelsons told you the story. Just a handful of those pages survived and were saved. And so each of these that survived is unique. Many were hand-sewn together, and if you had all the gatherings, you could go and make your own book, essentially. We also asked him to bring along a copy of the original printing of the Book of Mormon. Were there 5,000 issued? There were 5,000 of the first edition of the Book of Mormon published just up the road here in Palmyra. Yeah. And we have we have a copy that I can grab. Can we do that? Sure.

One million dollars. Or more. Yeah. So we can say the same thing about the Book of Mormon. The original copies of the Book of Mormon are worth? Oh, probably $80,000 is about the going rate right now. Yeah. Worth more if you follow it.

And so this is 1830. And you can tell it's the original by the imprint of the iron on that first page. That's right. We think as pages were drying, they probably set some sort of iron down on it that left these indentations. Most of the first editions that you see have that diamond pattern in there. The other thing that's fun about the first edition is that you have a preface written by the Prophet Joseph Smith that doesn't appear in any of the subsequent editions, where he explains the purpose of the Book of Mormon that he translated by the gift and power of God, and gives the gives a witness there, basically signed as the author that he puts there. And so it's much more common to, as you look at it, it's just in paragraph form. It's not broken into chapters and verses like we are all familiar with today. That happened later in 1879 by Orson Pratt, who changed the straight flow of text into chapters and verses that we could refer to for teaching. That's exactly right. And there's no index, but it does, however, at the end contain the testimony of the three witnesses and the eight witnesses, that they were shown the plates and they testified to the reality of the Book of Mormon. And so those have been there since the beginning.

Original Copies of Early Scriptures Shown to Youth

Description
Seated in the visitor’s center in Palmyra, President Russell M. Nelson shows original copies of the Book of Commandments and Book of Mormon to a group of youth, assisted by a Church historian.
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