An Apologetically Important Nonapologetic Book

In Understanding the Book of Mormon, Grant Hardy applies his unusual background in the history of historiography to the Book of Mormon, using the same techniques of literary analysis that are fruitfully employed in the study of classical Chinese, classical Greek, and other historical writing. He is able to identify very distinct historiographical approaches for Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. While he brackets the question of whether or not they were actually distinct historical persons, the most intuitively obvious reading of his work strongly suggests that they were—a proposition that has profound implications for the controversy surrounding the origin and authorship of the Book of Mormon