Joseph Smith never needed to step outside the walls of his own home to stumble upon the name of his central Book of Mormon character.

The most common Bibles circulating in New England households during the 1820s were the 1769 King James editions. Unlike many modern printings, these included the Apocrypha—fourteen books then commonly bound between the Old and New Testaments but later excluded from most Protestant Bibles.

One of those passages contains a striking detail:

“And Neemias called this thing Naphthar, which is as much as to say, a cleansing: but many men call it NEPHI.”

2 Maccabees 1:36 (AKJV-1769) emphasis added.

In other words, the name Nephi—so distinctive to modern readers of the Book of Mormon—was already sitting in plain sight in the very Bible Joseph Smith would have been most familiar with.