I am not a Mormon, but being as Joseph Smith was held prisoner in my hometown jail in Missouri, and my father was the president of the local historical association and we had a lot of conversations with Mormon elders when they built a large monument around the old city jail, I know more about the Mormons than most people, perhaps most Mormons. It is hardly necessary to belong to an organization to know about it, and in every organization there are many who are not all that interested in the history, either.
Specifically, there was no mention of a man who wrote what he called a "Biblical fantasy" and loaned the manuscript to Joseph Smith, after which it vanished, and Smith began transcribing the Book of Mormon from the gold plates revealed to him by the Angel Moroni. Then the author of the manuscript died, and the only COPY of his manuscript was stolen from his widow shortly after death.
Joseph Smith the Prophet claimed that he translated "ancient Chaldean" to something like King James English with a couple of magical lenses called Urum and Thummin and a seer stone. The LDS Church calls this a miracle, which seems about the only thing other than "fraud" one could call it. The series did say the following: that Smith was either a true prophet or a charlatan. There is a second episode that they might show tonight, or perhaps next week about contemporary Mormonism. South Park did a show on Mormons (Trey Parker is/was a Mormon).
There were a number of people who decided to try their hand at writing fantasy holy books in King James prose in the 1830's. I suppose that this was because the Bible was often the only book in most people's homes. There is another called "The Book of the Law of the Lord" that a fellow sent me long ago on a disk. Pretty difficult reading, really.
