“The Trial of the Stick of Joseph” by Jack H. West is an MP3 download. The book is a recording of two lectures Brother West gave on The Trial of the Stick of Joseph. I had the pleasure of personally attending many of Jack West’s lectures and it was a thrill to listen to this book, which is narrated by Jack West himself.

Brother West begins by giving a history of the idea behind writing the book. He and his father were partners in a large land development business in northern California, and it was decided that because of the size and complexity of their business, it would be helpful for one of them to get legal training. Because Jack was younger, he was selected.

In one of his years of law school, he had a law professor who was once a judge who believed that he shouldn’t give his students a written exam. He wanted his students to demonstrate their knowledge of the law in a classroom that was set up like a courtroom. Students were assigned to choose a subject to either defend or prosecute for this mock trial. Once they had selected their case and chosen whether they wanted to defend or prosecute, the remainder of the class would serve as the opposing legal team.  Brother West agonized over what case to defend or prosecute, until one day while reading the Book of Mormon, he became convinced that his test case would be to defend the authenticity of the Book of Mormon, the Stick of Joseph, against the charge of fraud. This was based on the many times that Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were put into the position of doing this very thing.

When he announced before the class of his fellow law students that his intentions were to defend the Book of Mormon, they were elated, thinking they would easily win this in a day’s time. Most trials lasted a day or two and sometimes a week. This “trial” lasted three weeks.  The trial started out by Brother West eliminating hearsay, or as he puts it, “someone thought that someone had said that someone thought what someone had said.”  After nearly three weeks of trial, upon concluding arguments by both the prosecution and defense, the judge ruled in favor of the defense, Brother West, and told the prosecution that they hadn’t even gotten a “toe hold, much less a foot hold in breaking down the marvelous evidence of the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.” After the trial, the law professor who was the judge, called Brother West in and told him that when he first told him what he wanted to defend, he “would not have given him a plug nickel” for the chances of his success, and that what he had heard was one of the most perfect law cases argued in all of his life.

Today, members of the Church are often admonished to be bold in our approach to sharing the gospel. Brother West has taken that admonition to the highest level.  Brother West was an entertaining speaker and was quick to back up his claims with scholarly works. He breaks his book down into three sections:

In the first section he discusses each one of the twelve personal witnesses of the Book of Mormon, and one by one describes their steadfast resolve to never deny their testimony of the truthfulness of what they heard and saw.

The second section describes how the Book of Mormon answers for itself the charges against it being the word of God. He describes how he debunked the prosecution’s assertions that the Book of Mormon could not be true by using the Book of Mormon itself.

The third part of the book goes into the anthropological evidence that has been found and is still being found to support the assertions made in the Book of Mormon. He gives several quotations from all the “ologists”, as he calls them, among which are anthropologists, zoologists, ethnologists, to name a few. In addition to all the scholarly works he used, he and his family personally visited South and Central America to gather evidence used in the presentation of this book.

“The Trial of the Stick of Joseph” by Jack H. West is an MP3 book download that I found as fascinating as the live lectures of Brother West that I attended. I recommend this as an excellent resource to consult in a year when we are studying the Book of Mormon in our Sunday School curriculum. It gives us more insight into this wonderful book.

Review by Darwin Richardson