Book of Mormon Evidence: Survivor Witnesses

A Literature of Survivor Witnesses

In his sobering 1973 study “Survivors and the Will to Bear Witness,” Terrence Des Pres draws attention to patterns of behavior exhibited by those who have suffered terrible human atrocities.¹ Des Pres explains, “Within the last twenty-five years a remarkable literature has come into being: all the forms of testimony which survivors give—diaries, novels, firsthand accounts—about the nature of survival in extremity and of the evil thus endured.”²

Des Pres’s work draws primarily on accounts from the survivors of Nazi and Soviet concentration camps during World War II. “What these books reveal most clearly … is the survivor’s will to remember and record.”³ Also relevant is that certain patterns have emerged from analysis of these records. “Survival, it turns out, is a specific kind of experience. It has a definite structure, and ‘to survive as witness’ is one of its forms.”⁴

Survivor Literature Noted by Latter-day Saint Scholars

Several Latter-day Saint scholars have noticed that this research is relevant to the Book of Mormon. Drawing upon Des Pres’ article, Lisa Bolin Hawkins and Gordon C. Thomasson have helpfully summarized the essential features of survivor accounts:⁵

1. The will to remember and record anchors the survivor in the moral purpose of bearing witness, thus maintaining his own integrity in conscious contradiction of the savagery around him.⁶
2. Witnessing of his experience is viewed as a duty, even a sacred task.⁷
3. It is instinctively felt, an involuntary outburst of feeling, born out of the horror that no one will be left.⁸
4. The task is carried out despite great risks; often in secret or by depositing the record in a secret archive.⁹
5. Survivors do not witness to inflict guilt or to rationalize their own survival. Their mission transcends guilt and their irrepressible urge to witness arises before any thought of guilt surfaces and at their initial stage of adjustment to extremity.¹⁰
6. They speak simply to tell, to describe, out of a common care for the life and the future, realizing that we all live in a realm of mutual sacrifice.¹¹
7. Survival in this sense is a collective act; the survivor has pledged to see that the story is told.¹² …
8. The survivors speak to the whole world, as a firsthand eye-witness, one whose words cannot be ignored.¹³
9. They view themselves as a necessary connection between the past and the future.¹⁴
10. They perceive that “out of horror … the truth will emerge and be made secure.” That “good and evil are only clear in retrospect,” for wisdom only comes at a terrible price. Thus, their mission is to display the “objective conditions of evil.”¹⁵

Those familiar with the Book of Mormon will likely notice that many of the above features are, to some extent or another, present in the stark accounts of human tragedy recorded by Book of Mormon prophets. Ether, Lehi, Nephi, Jacob, Alma the Elder, Alma the Younger, Amulek, Mormon, and Moroni—each of these men witnessed terrible human suffering and lived to tell about it. Appendix 1 provides analysis for each of these individuals (except Mormon and Moroni) and their status as survivor-witnesses.  

Mormon and Moroni as Survivor Witnesses

Mormon and Moroni, in particular, can be seen as the Book of Mormon’s consummate survivor witnesses. Not only did they each behold the entire destruction of their people, but they wrote the most extensively and intimately about their divine commission to record these horrific events. As assessed by Hawkins and Thomasson, “Virtually each of the ten characteristics of the survivor-witness typology listed at the beginning of this paper is present in the words and deeds of Mormon and Moroni.”¹⁶

Concerning the destruction of his people, Mormon commented, “I did even as the Lord had commanded me; and I did stand as an idle witness to manifest unto the world the things which I saw and heard” (Mormon 3:16). Clearly, he viewed it as a sacred duty to share these things with the world. Mormon saw his son Moroni as sharing in this obligation: “it supposeth me that [Moroni] will witness the entire destruction of my people. But may God grant that he may survive them, that he may write somewhat concerning them” (Words of Mormon 1:1–2).

Moroni later confirmed that this indeed was the outcome: “And my father also was killed by them, and I even remain alone to write the sad tale of the destruction of my people” (Mormon 8:3). Moroni may have been able to save himself by joining the Lamanites (Moroni 1:2). Instead, at great risk to his own life, he wandered for years without friend or family in order to preserve his people’s writings (v. 3).

And, indeed, the preservation of a record was essential. These writings would provide the means of warning future audiences and connecting them to past prophets. For those who treat the Book of Mormon lightly, Moroni warned that the Lord will say unto them: “Did I not declare my words unto you, which were written by this man, like as one crying from the dead?” (Moroni 10:27–28). The Book of Mormon is truly a record that the world cannot ignore. A more comprehensive documentation of Mormon and Moroni’s relevant statements are presented in a chart in Appendix 2.

Conclusion

According to Thomasson, “Obviously, there are several differences among the personalities, conditions, and divine callings of each survivor witness in the Book of Mormon, as well as between them and the survivors of modern holocausts. But there are also many distinctive and unexpected similarities.”¹⁷ These similarities suggest that the Book of Mormon was not merely derived from Joseph Smith’s active imagination, but rather from individuals who experienced authentic atrocities of calamitous proportions.

As concluded by Hawkins and Thomasson,

… there is enough said about the horrible experiences of some of the prophets and others [in the Book of Mormon] that we can discern that they suffered in a manner analogous to those who have suffered in the man-made hells of the Twentieth Century. That the response of the Book of Mormon peoples to that type of atrocity and widespread death is so accurately similar to a typical human phenomenon observed and analyzed in remarkably parallel detail under comparable circumstances by a Twentieth Century sociologist—especially where genocides and calamities of the magnitude studied by Des Pres and depicted in the Book of Mormon were unprecedented in the world of Joseph Smith—is worthy of note.”¹⁸