The Book of Mormon as additional scripture

Latter-day Saints affirm the Book of Mormon as scripture alongside the Bible, a record, which they believe Joseph Smith translated by divine gift from ancient golden plates, of peoples in the ancient Americas and of the risen Christ's ministry among them. Subtitled "Another Testament of Jesus Christ," it stands with the Bible and further Latter-day Saint scriptures as authoritative. For members its coming forth is evidence of the restoration of the gospel through Joseph Smith, and reading it and asking God about its truth is a central invitation of the faith. Joseph Smith dictated the text between 1827 and 1829, working from golden plates he said he obtained near Palmyra, New York, using seer stones placed in a hat; the book was published in 1830, and every edition since has printed the testimonies of the Three Witnesses and Eight Witnesses, associates of Smith who affirmed having seen the plates.

Mainstream archaeology and genetics have not corroborated the book's claim of ancient Near Eastern populations migrating to and populating the Americas: no artifacts, inscriptions, or place names consistent with the narrative have been identified by non-Latter-day Saint archaeologists, and DNA studies of Indigenous American populations show predominantly East Asian ancestry rather than the Near Eastern lineage the traditional reading implies, findings some Latter-day Saint scholars have addressed by proposing a limited geographic and genetic footprint for the events described.

The acceptance of scripture beyond the Bible is a defining feature of the Latter-day Saint movement and distinguishes it from the historic Christian traditions, which hold the biblical canon closed. It expresses the movement's self-understanding as a restoration of original Christianity rather than a reform of it, and it is inseparable from the belief in continuing revelation through living prophets. This entry describes the Book of Mormon as Latter-day Saints hold it, as sacred and true scripture, without adjudicating the historical and theological questions others raise about it.

Acceptance of the Book of Mormon is not confined to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints alone: the Community of Christ (formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints), the second-largest Restoration denomination, also publishes the book but has moved toward treating it as one inspired witness among others rather than as co-equal with, or an inerrant supplement to, the Bible, and some of its members question its historicity while retaining it devotionally. This divergence illustrates how the several Restoration churches that descend from Joseph Smith's original movement, which split after his death in 1844, have not maintained a single, uniform understanding of the very scripture that first defined the movement's claim to a restored gospel.