eBook

George M. Papa (1943) was born in Chicago during WWII, being the oldest child of a Catholic, Croatian, sailor father and a devout many-generation Mormon mother from Northern Arizona, who had graduated from Brigham Young University. Two weeks after his birth, George and his Mother moved to Snowflake, Arizona to live with her parents and to wait out the war. However, the month before George was born, his father converted to Mormonism so George would not be born a half breed. After the war, George’s parents settled in Northern Arizona where four more sons were born.

In 182o, God and Jesus Christ appeared to 14 year-old Joseph Smith and told him that other messengers would assist him to restore Cod’s true church upon the earth. On September 22, 1827, a resurrected being, named Moroni, directed Joseph to a depository in a nearby hill, which contained the history of a vast civilization that flourished on the American Continent 1,400 years previous. Part of that record became known as ‘The Small Plates of Nephi’, which is dramatized in this book.

This book is not fiction. The story line is simple. In the year boo BC, during the first year of the reign of King Zedekiah, Jerusalem was a wicked city that rejected the prophets God sent to call the people to repentance. One of those prophets was Lehi. One day Jesus Christ commanded Lehi to immediately gather his family and depart into the wilderness that very night, which they did. The reason was because Lehi’s life was in danger and God had other plans for Lehi. Eight years later, Jesus Christ further commanded Nephi, the fourth son of Lehi, to build a ship, with the help of his brothers, to cross the might ocean and come to what is now North America, to begin a new civilization.

This book is the big-screen adaption of the first portion of the Book of Mormon. It features the Old Testament events and prophesies that portended the exodus to America, including the accounts of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and particularly Joseph who was sold into Egypt, which combine with scores of paintings and photographs to convince the world as to the wisdom, designs and the love of God.