The record we are now studying, First and Second Nephi, is the translation of the account that Nephi began engraving upon another smaller set of plates thirty years after Lehi left Jerusalem. The record kept upon the first set of plates was translated and written on “one hundred and sixteen pages of manuscript on foolscap paper.” Martin Harris was acting as Joseph’s scribe during the translation, and persuaded Joseph to let him show the manuscript to a few select persons. “He bound himself as [Joseph] required of him, took the writings, and went his way. Notwithstanding, however, the great restrictions which he had been laid under, and the solemnity of the covenant which he had made with me, he did show them to others, and by stratagem they got them from him, and they have never been recovered unto this day” (HC, 1:20–21). We will leave a further discussion of the lost manuscript for another section of this book. Suffice it to say that the two records are known in the Church today as the large plates of Nephi, and the small plates of Nephi. Today we have the small plates of Nephi (1 Nephi through Words of Mormon) and an abridgment of the large plates.