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Unknown Scribe. On the Mormon side, the church's historian, Leonard Arrington, responded that the new attack on the Book of Mormon meant "absolutely nothing." The writing of the unknown scribe, he said, "follows on the same page and precedes on another page material written" by others. How, he asked, could twelve pages written by Spalding match the paper of pages that precede and follow them?
Even if Smith used Spalding's manuscript, why would Smith have been so foolish as to retain pages of a known manuscript within a work he said was inspired by God? Davis & Co. answer —somewhat lamely—that Smith was so poverty-stricken that he and his aides might have stuck sections of Spalding's manuscript between pages of their own in order to save paper, which was scarce and expensive in those days.
Officially the Mormon Church remains unruffled. It is welcoming the researchers and handwriting experts to Salt Lake City to study the original documents. Said a spokesman: "We still declare that the Book of Mormon is precisely what we have always said it was—a divinely revealed scripture of ancient American people."
* Detractors of Mormons make much of records showing that the year before he started his book, Smith was convicted for hiring himself out to locate buried treasure by use of a magic "seer stone."