Paper summary · by Don Bradley · 1829–1830 · original in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, vol. 27 (2018)
This paper is under separate copyright and is summarized here rather than reproduced; see the note and citation at the end for how to read it in full.
What the earliest newspaper reports said
In October 1829, Palmyra editor Abner Cole reported — apparently drawing on an earlier, now-lost item from the rival Palmyra Freeman — that the new Book of Mormon believers intended to build “the Temple of Nephi,” and that this had supposedly been announced in a paper he mockingly called the “New-Jerusalem Reflector.” No such paper existed; Cole was needling the Freeman by treating Palmyra itself as if it had already been renamed the New Jerusalem. Bradley’s paper argues that both details in Cole’s report — a temple named for Nephi, and a New Jerusalem located at Palmyra rather than in Missouri — reflect a genuine, now-overshadowed early understanding among the first believers, traceable to Martin Harris’s own statements at the Grandin print shop in the summer of 1829.
An American Ark, not a mass grave
The paper’s central argument concerns how the earliest believers understood the hill and stone box where the plates were found, before the Book of Mormon’s own account of the Nephites’ destruction at “Cumorah” (translated in May 1829) was applied back onto that same New York hill. Bradley argues that Martin Harris and other early believers instead understood the stone box as an American counterpart to the biblical Ark of the Covenant — a reading supported by the relics Joseph Smith reported finding inside it (the interpreters and breastplate, paralleling the Urim and Thummim; the sword of Laban, paralleling the sword of Goliath kept beside the biblical Ark). On this reading, the hill functioned in the earliest believers’ imagination as an American Mount Moriah — the site of a First Temple, not a graveyard — which is what made a temple and a New Jerusalem seem plausible there in the first place.
Why the location shifted to Missouri
The paper connects this early, Palmyra-centered understanding to the church’s September 1830 revelation (D&C 28), which countered a rival revelation from Book of Mormon witness Hiram Page and declared that the location of the New Jerusalem “is not revealed” and would be given only later — explicitly ruling out a Palmyra-Manchester location by placing the future city instead “on the borders of the Lamanites.” Independence, Missouri, was not named as the location for Zion until a revelation the following year, 1831. Read this way, the church’s early geography of gathering went through more than one candidate location before Missouri, and the earliest candidate was upstate New York itself.
Bradley, Don. “Building the Temple of Nephi: Early Mormon Perceptions of Cumorah and the New Jerusalem.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 27 (2018): 264–277. © 2018 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. This summary is original wording; the article itself is available through the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies / Neal A. Maxwell Institute and is not reproduced here.