'The rising of Holy Bible'
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In the years just prior to the Restoration there occurred a "mighty movement to print and distribute the holy scriptures on a scale never before seen," said Richard E. Bennett.
"Without this establishing culture of the Bible one wonders how successful the message of Cumorah would have been," he said.
Speaking at the 33rd annual Sidney B. Sperry Symposium Oct. 29, Brother Bennett, a BYU professor of Church History and Doctrine, addressed the topic, "Without Note or Comment: the Holy Bible Rising to the Restoration."
"Latter-day Saints would do well to pause and reflect on the debt we owe the Holy Bible, what President Heber J. Grant called the 'Book of books,' " said Brother Bennett. "It was, after all, the Holy Bible that inspired the boy prophet, Joseph Smith, in the spring of 1820."
In the years immediately leading up to the organization of the Church, he explained, something remarkable occurred that promoted an awareness and widespread popular ownership of the Bible that had not existed before.
Although the Bible had been printed and in circulation for centuries, only in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries did it finally begin to be printed in vast quantities and distributed worldwide into the hands of millions who before that time had never owned their own personal copy of scripture.
This occurred "due to many people, from John Wesley to Mary Jones, and to many factors, including Sunday Schools, missionary and tract societies, and the rise of Bible societies in far reaches of the globe, and to indefinable currents in world history," he said.
