The Very Things Which the Brother of Jared Saw
Of the plates that Joseph Smith received from the angel Moroni, which ancient prophet wrote the largest portion? If we take only what we have in the Book of Mormon today, i.e. what Joseph actually translated after the 116 pages were lost, the answer to that question would clearly be Mormon. He wrote the text from the Words of Mormon through Mormon 7, comprising about 337 pages of the current book we have today. That makes up about 63.5% of the book, with the rest of the writings coming from the writers on the small plates (1 Nephi 1 – Omni) and Moroni (Momon 8 – Moroni 10). If we included the lost 116 pages, that percentage would of course be even higher. But even then, the answer to the question is still probably not Mormon. The reason is that in the plates that Joseph received, an estimated one-half of them were sealed and not translated by Joseph. It was David Whitmer who said that about one-half of the plates Joseph received were sealed (and Orson Pratt suggested that it was even ...