Elder George Reynolds

Elder George Reynolds was a Latter-day Saint writer, church secretary, and religious historian. The Myth of the “Manuscript Found” appeared in 1883 as the eleventh book of the Faith-Promoting Series, issued by the Juvenile Instructor Office in Salt Lake City. Reynolds wrote it to challenge the theory that Joseph Smith derived the Book of Mormon from an unpublished romance attributed to Solomon Spaulding. He organizes the work as a sustained rebuttal, examining statements about the missing manuscript, differences between the narratives, publication history, and testimony repeated by critics of the church. Project Gutenberg identifies Reynolds as the author and preserves the volume’s longer subtitle, which describes the Spaulding account as a story he intends to disprove. Contemporary bibliographic scholarship also places the book within Reynolds’s wider body of religious history, which includes The Story of the Book of Mormon. The Myth of the “Manuscript Found” serves simultaneously as a nineteenth-century apologetic text and a record of an early controversy over authorship and origins.