"Codex"is a technical term usually applied to an ancient method of preserving large amounts of writing. It means multiple leaves of materials (parchment, papyrus, paper or such) with writing, held together at one edge. Today we call it a "book". The description of Mormon's "gold plates" (and perhaps also Laban's "brass plates") fits that definition: they were both a codex. The earliest known historical mention or occurrence of a codex is in the 1st century AD, in Rome.

But Nephi's plates were supposedly made around six centuries earlier, and the brass plates even before that.

Hmm... How does a Mormon explain that?

By stating, with fervor, "Yay, ghawd!!"

Why can't you remember God is magic?

I haven't been able to prove it for sure, but it seems that Nephi wrote the world's earliest first-person autobiography, too.

It only makes sense that he would invent the first book.

Also...A Bible, a Bible! We already got a stinkin' Bible!
(Or, however that verse goes.)

Interesting. That's an important question.

I remember seeing a picture by some church artist of the plates with giant loop rings holding the pages together. It made me chuckle at the time wondering if there was a hole puncher they used to add pages to the ringed binder.

missionary visual aids, I'm thinking.

I'm pretty sure most of those have now disappeared down the memory hole along with the image of Joey sitting at a table with a scribe on the other side of a curtain.

Easy. It was transliterated. There is a lot of apologetics using this reason.

It was basically like Isaiah text with Smith watching a movie in a hat.

"The earliest known historical mention or occurrence of a codex is in the 1st century AD, in Rome."

Obviously they didn’t look in the cave under the Hill Cumorah.

Same way gawd gave JS google Translate 200 years ahead of google, and it even had a handy shatter-proof case.

One of these days a GA will mistake the seer stone for a suppository.

Just think how far ahead the church would have been if Moroni would have delivered Joe the BoM on a 5.25 floppy disk.

I hated the phrase, "five and a half inch floppy..."

I hated having to exaggerate.

Interesting observation!