Welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. I'm Joseph Stewart. How did early Latter-day Saints read the book of Mormon?

And what did that book, which the prophet Joseph Smith called the most correct of any book on earth and the keystone of our religion, help Latter-day Saints make sense of their lives?

In this episode of the Maxwell Institute podcast, Dr. Janice Johnson, a Willis Center research fellow at the Institute, shares more from her research into early Latter-day Saint readings of the Book of Mormon.

This is the first episode in which I am hosting the podcast, and I am anxious to hear your feedback.

Please reach out at MIPodcast at BYU.edu with any questions or charitable feedback that you may have.

Dr. Janice Johnson, welcome to the Maxwell Institute podcast. Thank you. It's good to be here.

Now, in your article, becoming a people of the books, toward an understanding of early Mormon converts and the new word of the Lord in the

Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. I was curious by the choice of phrase becoming a people of the book.

What does that mean to you? The phrase actually comes from the Quran. It is a phrase used to describe

people, religious people, who believe in a book. And the early Americans were

mostly a people of the Bible. They were immersed in the biblical text. They often learned to

read using the Bible. And they were definitely a people of the book. Is this something that you see as a historian of the early church of Jesus Christ of

Latter-day Saints that they are continually not only referencing the King James Bible, but also

the Book of Mormon?

And that's what I'm most interested in, is understanding our early Latter-day Saints' relationship with the Book of Mormon.

The Bible certainly did not lose importance as people developed a relationship with this new book of Scripture,

but I'm most interested in how they decided to expand beyond an idea of Sola Scripura, that the Bible was the

authority, and to expand their notion of scripture to this new book of scripture, nearly 600

pages of new scripture. That's what I'm most focused on. Now, when you say Sola Scriptora, that's a phrase that goes back to Martin Luther.

Could you tell us more about that?

We have Protestant theologians post-Martin Luther who develop,

and that becomes one of the foundational elements of Protestantism,

...