Papers

A growing library of standalone scholarly papers on the 1829–1834 Church of Christ, each focused on a single document, event, or question. Full papers are attributed to their authors; where a paper is under separate copyright, this page summarizes it and links to the original.

The Chronology, Formation & Reorganization, The Law, Organizational Structure, The Plat, The House, and Name Change pages tell this site’s own connected narrative of 1829–1834. The papers below stand apart from that narrative — each is a focused, standalone piece of scholarship on one document, one event, or one open question from the same five years, contributed by outside researchers. The first three below stay within that window, contributed by an outside researcher; a further set, added after, ranges more widely — some projecting the Law and Plat forward, some reaching well past 1834 — and is marked as such.

Paper	Author	Focus
The Law: An Hundred Fold	Don Bradley	How the 1831 Law reconciled New York’s entrepreneurial restorationism with Kirtland’s communal “Big Family,” and how its promise of “an hundred fold” return played out through the United Firm, the Plat, and the Law’s 1834 abandonment.
Elder and Elect Lady: Male and Female Authority in the 1830 Revelations	Don Bradley	How the July 1830 revelation for Emma Smith (D&C 25) parallels and interlocks with the revelations for Joseph Smith and the Articles and Covenants around it.
Building the Temple of Nephi: Early Mormon Perceptions of Cumorah and the New Jerusalem	Don Bradley	What the earliest Palmyra newspaper reports (1829–1830) reveal about how the first believers understood the hill, the stone box, and where a temple and New Jerusalem might be built — before Missouri was ever named. Summary only; see note below.

“Building the Temple of Nephi” was originally published in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies (vol. 27, 2018) and is copyrighted by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois / Neal A. Maxwell Institute. Its own terms prohibit re-posting the full text online, so this site summarizes it and links to the original rather than reproducing it.

Further Papers by David R. Hall

The papers below go further than the table above: some argue positions, some project the Plat and Law forward into a proposed future community, and some reach past 1834 entirely. They’re included here as supplementary context rather than as part of this site’s own 1829–1834 documentary narrative.

Paper	Author	Focus
One Mile Square	David R. Hall	Reads the Plat’s units and language against sixteenth-century English rather than nineteenth-century American usage, and projects the resulting design forward as a future, not historical, community.
Sections 42, 57, 94 & 95, the Plat of the City of Zion, and the Plan of the House of the Lord	David R. Hall	A fifty-year personal research study, from a 1973 encounter with President Harold B. Lee to a detailed reconstruction of what the 1833 revelations specify.
The Origins of Apostolic Superiority	Don Bradley	How seniority became the basis of rank within the Quorum of the Twelve, tracing the question from 1829 into twentieth- and twenty-first-century church succession — well past this site’s 1834 stopping point.
Organizational Structure for Zion Communities in the Latter Days	David R. Hall	Derives a detailed organizational structure from Sections 94–95, the Plat, and the House of the Lord.
The Three Witnesses to the Details of Organizational Structure	David R. Hall	The Plat and House design (1833), read for organizational specifics.
Dimensions of the City of Zion	David R. Hall	The Plat, the “Tyndale mile,” and the geometry of a proposed modern community.
Constitutional Architecture in the Plot and House Pattern	David R. Hall	Source hierarchy and lexical drift across the Plot, Sections 94–95, and the House.
Constitutional Lexicon	David R. Hall	A controlled glossary translating the Law, Plat, and House’s sixteenth-century terms into modern equivalents.
The Zion Plat, the Kirtland Vision, and Their Enduring Legacy	David R. Hall	A reconstruction from the 1829 Book of Mormon translation to the 1877 St. George Temple dedication — well past 1834.
The Quadriune Godhead	David R. Hall	A comparative-theology essay arguing for a four-personage divine presidency across world traditions. Not a documentary analysis of the 1829–1834 record.

More papers are being added to this library over time.