Yes. There is a specific historical theory that Sidney Rigdon, rather than Joseph Smith, was the principal human author or “architect” of the Book of Mormon. It is usually called the Spalding–Rigdon theory.
But there are actually several versions of the idea, and the evidence for them is quite different.
The basic theory
The classic version goes roughly like this:
Solomon Spalding → wrote an unpublished historical romance about ancient inhabitants of America
↓
Sidney Rigdon → somehow obtained the manuscript and substantially rewrote/adapted it, adding a religious/theological framework
↓
Joseph Smith + Oliver Cowdery → brought the resulting work into publication as the Book of Mormon
In the stronger version, Rigdon was the intellectual mastermind, while Smith was the public prophet/front man. This is essentially the theory you are asking about. The idea appeared remarkably early: accusations identifying Rigdon as the real author were already being published in 1831, only about a year after the Book of Mormon appeared.
Why Rigdon was considered a plausible candidate
Rigdon was a much more educated and theologically sophisticated man than Joseph Smith. He had been a Baptist/Restorationist preacher and was deeply interested in biblical interpretation.
Critics therefore found it difficult to believe that Smith could have produced the Book of Mormon's rather unusual combination of:
- King James-style biblical language
- Restorationist theology
- elaborate narratives
- biblical typology
- debates about baptism, atonement, faith and works
- American frontier themes
Rigdon seemed like the sort of person who could have constructed such a work.
And this isn't merely a modern internet theory. The Rigdon hypothesis was being proposed by critics during the 1830s.
The major problem: the chronology
This is where the theory runs into a serious difficulty.
Rigdon's documented conversion to Mormonism occurred after the Book of Mormon had already been published. He encountered the book through missionaries in Ohio in late 1830. He subsequently met Joseph Smith.
To make Rigdon the author, therefore, one needs a previous, undocumented relationship between Rigdon and Joseph Smith, or between Rigdon and the manuscript that became the Book of Mormon.
And this is precisely what the historical evidence has failed to establish.
The BYU Religious Studies Center notes that critics have repeatedly attempted to establish such a pre-1830 connection, but no historical evidence has been produced demonstrating that Rigdon had contact with Joseph Smith before the Book of Mormon appeared or that he had access to the Spalding manuscript.
That's a major weakness.
And then there's the Spalding manuscript
This is probably the most damaging problem for the classic theory.
In 1884, an actual manuscript written by Solomon Spalding was recovered from among papers at Oberlin College. It was published in 1885/1886.
It turned out to be a story about Romans who had come to America—but it does not bear the close textual resemblance to the Book of Mormon that the original witnesses to the alleged manuscript had claimed.
Consequently, most serious critics eventually abandoned the straightforward:
Spalding manuscript = Book of Mormon source
argument.
There remains a more elaborate version:
Spalding wrote another manuscript, which has been lost, and that was the manuscript Rigdon used.
But now the theory becomes substantially more speculative.
There is nevertheless an interesting modern twist
You may have encountered this because of stylometry—statistical analysis of writing style.
A 2008 paper by Matthew Jockers, Daniela Witten and Craig Criddle used computational authorship analysis on the Book of Mormon. Their results were quite striking: they concluded that the likely nineteenth-century contributors included Solomon Spalding, Sidney Rigdon and Oliver Cowdery, and specifically argued that the results supported the Spalding–Rigdon theory, with Rigdon appearing as the strongest unifying signal.
So there really is a modern academic-looking study that says essentially what you're asking about:
Rigdon may have been the principal architect of the Book of Mormon.
However, this is not remotely settled.
The problem is that the 2008 study used a closed set of candidate authors. In other words, the analysis was essentially asking:
“Which of these candidates looks most like the text?”
rather than allowing the statistical procedure to answer:
“Could the author be somebody completely outside our candidate set?”
A subsequent study by Schaalje, Fields, Roper and Snow criticized this methodology and found dramatically different results when using an open-set approach. Their analysis did not support Rigdon, Spalding or Smith as the likely author.
So stylometry has not established Rigdon's authorship.
My assessment
I'd rank the propositions differently:
The fascinating thing is that “Rigdon was the real author” is not a crazy theory invented decades later. It was proposed almost immediately and has been investigated repeatedly. But the strongest version requires us to posit precisely the thing for which the theory lacks evidence: a secret pre-1830 connection between Rigdon and the Book of Mormon project.
And there's an interesting intermediate possibility that is considerably more historically economical: Joseph Smith was the principal creator, but the Book of Mormon emerged from a broader intellectual environment involving Smith, Cowdery, Sidney Rigdon's Restorationist milieu, the Bible, and contemporary American religious ideas. That doesn't require the elaborate conspiracy of the Spalding–Rigdon hypothesis.
If you're interested, I can also explain why Rigdon's theology looks remarkably similar to parts of the Book of Mormon even though the documented chronology seems to rule out his being its author—that's probably the strongest part of the Rigdon argument.
And this is where the Rigdon hypothesis becomes more interesting than the simple Spalding story, because there really are striking parallels between Rigdon's pre-Mormon religious environment and some of the Book of Mormon's theology.
But we have to separate “the Book of Mormon resembles Rigdon's theology” from “therefore Rigdon wrote it.” The first is demonstrable to some degree; the second does not follow automatically.
1. Rigdon came out of the Restorationist/Campbellian world
Before Mormonism, Sidney Rigdon was a prominent preacher in the religious movement associated with Thomas and Alexander Campbell. That movement sought to restore what its adherents regarded as primitive Christianity, stripping away later ecclesiastical traditions.
This is important because the Book of Mormon contains an unusually large amount of material concerned with precisely the sorts of questions being debated among Restorationists in the 1820s:
- baptism
- rebaptism
- priesthood and authority
- repentance
- faith
- grace
- atonement
- the nature of Christ
- resurrection
- the Fall
- original sin
- infant baptism
- the organization of the Christian church
- competing forms of baptism
In fact, Alexander Campbell himself noticed this almost immediately. In February 1831, just months after publication, he argued that the Book of Mormon was essentially Joseph Smith's reflection on contemporary religious controversies, explicitly listing infant baptism, ordination, the Trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the Fall, Atonement, fasting, penance, church government, resurrection, eternal punishment and baptism among its subjects. At that point Campbell actually considered Joseph Smith the sole author, however.
That last detail is quite important.
Campbell was familiar with Rigdon. Yet his initial reaction was not “this is Rigdon's theology.” He thought it was Smith's work.
Only after reading Eber D. Howe's Mormonism Unvailed did Campbell change his mind and become an advocate of the Rigdon/Spalding explanation.
