First, a tighter definition of verisimilitude [Note 1]:

The semblance of truth or reality in literary works; or the literary principle that requires a consistent illusion of truth to life. The term covers both the exclusion of improbabilities (as in realism and naturalism) and the careful distinguishing of improbabilities in non-realistic works. As a critical principle, it originates in Aristotle’s concept of mimesis or imitation of nature.

The verisimilitude issue presents two questions, one for the author of a text and one for its readers.

The Problem for Authors and Historians

To what extent does an author intend for the text to offer “truth to life” or an “imitation of nature”? At first glance, this question seems more pressing for fictional works: some genres by convention allow departures from the real world known by the author (science fiction, magic realism) while mainstream fiction typically presents events and characters that are true to life in the sense that they are not out of place in the reader’s world or, for historical fiction, in the period depicted. But journalists and historians face the issue as well. How does a journalist report an observer’s experience of a UFO sighting or a seemingly miraculous recovery? How does a historian deal with historical sources that report events that conflict with the historian’s understanding of the real world?

Historical sources cannot be accepted at face value. Historians must weigh and evaluate the value of any historical source, determine whether it is reliable, and attempt to compensate for any bias in that source. The older the source, the more likely it recounts events that the modern historian will not consider plausible. The issue is particularly pressing for modern scholars of religion who use ancient religious texts. When should a modern commentator dismiss a reported event (say the discussion Balaam had with his donkey at Number 22:28-30), accept an event as reported but not necessarily the interpretation offered in the source (perhaps dreams recounted by many biblical writers), or accept an event more or less as reported (the narrative in 2 Kings recounting the Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem and deportation of the leading citizens)?

The Problem for Readers

Just as an author of fiction or nonfiction has choices to make, so too does the reader make an implicit evaluation of any book, story, or article. If a novel introduces too many coincidences, the reader might at some point dismiss the events. Even genres that allow departures from reality will lose a reader if the departures are inconsistent or do violence to the plot or story. Readers evaluate nonfictional narratives as well. If the content of a news report appears to reflect a journalist’s bias rather than the actual events, a reader rebels. If a historical account appears to accept questionable sources, ignore credible sources, or accept the occurrence of events that a reader refuses to accept as plausible, a reader may dismiss the history as lacking credibility.

What about religious texts? Does a reader evaluate a biblical passage with respect to the real world as a secular observer would understand it in 2012? As a religious believer would understand it in 2012? As the original author of the text appears to have understood it? What rules should a modern reader apply when evaluating ancient texts, in particular the Bible? This really is the key question for modern readers of the Bible.

A secular reader may simply dismiss events recounted in the Bible that are inconsistent with his scientific or naturalistic understanding of the world as of 2012. But a believing reader has trickier choices to make. Even modern readers who accept the biblical account of events as stated have a hard time accepting the biblical three-tier view of the cosmos: waters above the dome of the sky or firmament, our earthly landscape in the middle, and sheol and more waters below. What do we make of the “windows of heaven” if there are no windows and there is no dome? How do modern readers understand accounts of demonic possession and healing by exorcism when the symptoms described appear to be a case of epilepsy rather than possession? Were there demons?

These examples are given simply to point out that verisimilitude is a complicated issue for a modern believing reader of an ancient religious text. Which departures from “truth to life” do we allow, and why? In terms of verisimilitude, what world is a scriptural narrative true to?

The Problem for You

You are a modern reader. You read the Bible and the Book of Mormon. To what world do you relate these texts? What world do you live in? We relate texts to our world (or to some world) without thinking about it much. Here is a passage from Robert Alter that sketches out the magnitude of the task we unwittingly perform when we read and understand ancient religious texts. His comments are aimed at literature but can be profitably applied to historical texts and religious narrative. [Note 2]

Literature is a representational art, but the relation between the literary text and the world it represents has always been something of a puzzle, and recent trends in literary theory have compounded the puzzlement. The objects of literary representation belong to a wide range of heterogeneous categories, material, conceptual, emotional, relational, personal, and collective. They include states of feeling, moments of perception, memories …; buildings, neighborhoods, industrial processes, social institutions …; world-historical forces and theological ideas ….

Fictional character is probably the crucial test case for the link between literature and reality. Very few people will take the trouble to read a novel or story unless they can somehow “identify” with the characters, live with them inwardly as though they were real at least for the duration of the reading.

You might reject the three-tier conceptual scheme of the cosmos presented in the Bible yet accept Genesis 1 as a claim that God created the cosmos as we now view it. You likely identify with some of the individuals you encounter in the scriptures, even if you don’t identify with how they saw the world in some of the ways Alter notes above. I think we do a lot more work when reading the scriptures than we generally recognize.

The World of the Book of Mormon

So, to now return to the opening question, how do we describe the “truth to life” or “imitation of nature” that Book of Mormon narratives undertake? My suggestion is that the primary reference world for Book of Mormon narratives is not the natural world of 2012 or the natural world of 1830 but the world of the Bible. Jaredite barges are plausible not because of maritime technology but because Noah had his ark, so it makes perfect sense that Jared can have his barges. The descent from the sky of Jesus Christ narrated in Third Nephi is plausible in view of his ascent into the sky and his promised return “in like manner” at Acts 1:9-11. Nephi and Lehi’s prison narrative in Helaman 5 is plausible because of a similar narrative concerning Paul and Silas in Acts 16, and so forth. The fact that about ten percent of the Book of Mormon is textual quotation from various biblical texts only highlights the tight link between the world of the Book of Mormon and the world of the Bible. They are the same world.

For the first generation of Book of Mormon readers, that relation was entirely natural. Those first readers were much more familiar with the Bible than modern readers of the Book of Mormon. Those first readers lived before critical reflection on the Bible had matured, so they likely read the Bible in a more straightforward fashion than we do. Not all of those first readers accepted the Book of Mormon as divine or authentic, of course, but those who accepted the Bible were unlikely to reject the Book of Mormon because of implausibility. A reader who accepts biblical accounts of floating axe heads, God stopping the Earth’s rotation for a few hours so the Israelites could win a battle, and young Jews thrown into a hot furnace later emerging unscathed is unlikely to reject the Book of Mormon for containing implausible or impossible events.

But the second decade of the 21st century is a much different world than the fourth decade of the 19th century. How do we modern readers relate the world of the Book of Mormon to the world of the Bible or to our own world of 2012? Or do we perform that operation in reverse, instead relating the events of our own world of 2012 to the world of the Book of Mormon? Does a deeper understanding of biblical books and events change our reading of Book of Mormon events? Or does the Book of Mormon commit readers to a fixed and unchanging traditional view of the Bible?

Earlier posts in this series:

• Which Book of Mormon?
• The Book of Mormon: What has it done for you lately?
• The Book of Mormon as Narrative

Notes

1. “Verisimilitude,” in Chris Baldick, Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms, OUP, 2d ed., 2001.

2. Robert Alter, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, Simon and Schuster, 1989, p. 49.

Historical Fiction

Here is the key question: How does a reader distinguish between historical fiction and actual historical narrative? Authors of historical fiction may volunteer that information in the title or the text, as with Michael Shaara’s The Killer Angels: A Novel of the Civil War, a historical novel recounting the battle of Gettysburg. It won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1975. Even absent such authorial disclosure, features of the narrative itself can also signal that the text is historical fiction. Sometimes narrative details are obviously supplied by the author rather than by historical records or observations. Here are the first few lines from The Killer Angels, recounting the activities of a spy employed by Confederate General Longstreet.

He rode into the dark of the woods and dismounted. He crawled upward on his belly over cool rocks out into the sunlight, and suddenly he was in the open and he could see for miles, and there was the whole vast army below him, filling the valley like a smoking river.

Even more indicative of historical fiction is when the text recounts the thoughts or even the dreams of a character, as in this short passage concerning John Buford, the Union cavalry commander who on the first day of the battle occupied and held the ridges northwest of Gettysburg until Union infantry arrived to reinforce his position.

Buford rode back to the seminary. He made his headquarters there. … He dismounted and sat down to rest. It was very quiet. He closed his eyes and he could see fields of snow, miles and miles of Wyoming snow, and white mountains in the distance ….

Both of the above quotations describe events as experienced by one character (limited to that character’s point of view) but narrated in the third person, the so-called “third-person limited point of view.” An even more limited point of view would describe only events and observations but not the thoughts or feelings of any character. This is the appropriate narrative stance for true historical narrative. In the other direction, a broader third-person point of view is “omniscient narration,” in which the narrator can know and relate any event as well as the thoughts and actions of any character.

Obviously, historians are not omniscient, hence omniscient narration is not appropriate for true historical narrative. Fictional narrative in general can select any point of view and can use first-person or third-person narrative, however the author chooses for the particular tale to be told. [Note 1]

Book of Mormon Narrative

The above discussion should help the reader pay more attention to point of view and voice (first- or third-person) when reading Book of Mormon narratives. This is certainly not a new idea. In 1995, one Edgar C. Snow, Jr. published “Narrative Criticism and the Book of Mormon,” reviewing how that approach “attempt[s] to isolate the narrative of a text from the real author of the text in an attempt to let a text speak for itself as much as possible.” Snow discusses the roles of implied author, narrator, narratee, and implied reader, as well as the implied author’s use of setting, events, and characters, but does not discuss point of view or focalization. [Note 2]

A more ambitious work is Mark D. Thomas’s Digging in Cumorah: Reclaiming Book of Mormon Narratives (Signature, 1999), which proposes to “focus[] on the internal literary features of the text and how these forms address its original nineteenth-century audience ….” Thomas adopts Robert Alter’s concept of narrative scenes, used by Alter to examine biblical narratives, to consider a variety of repeated Book of Mormon narrative scenes, such as warning prophets, conversion stories, and dying heretics. [Note 3]

Most recently, Grant Hardy employed concepts drawn from narrative criticism in his close reading of the Book of Mormon in his Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (OUP, 2010). Hardy highlights the narrative techniques employed by the three primary Book of Mormon narrators, Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. This is a book any serious student of the Book of Mormon must read. The best quick introduction to the book is Hardy’s 12 Questions interview posted last year here at Times and Seasons (Part 1, Part 2). [Note 4]

Those using narrative techniques to look at specific Book of Mormon narratives generally bracket or set aside questions of authorship and historicity in order to focus on the text itself. Otherwise, the debate over authorship and historicity invariably overshadows the discussion of the text. The LDS position on authorship and historicity is clear and unequivocal. Elder Oaks: “The historicity — historical authenticity — of the Book of Mormon is an issue so fundamental that it rests first upon faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, which is the first principle in this, as in all other matters.” [Notes 5] Elder Holland, from his October 2009 General Conference talk “Safety for the Soul“: “I want it absolutely clear when I stand before the judgment bar of God that I declared to the world, in the most straightforward language I could summon, that the Book of Mormon is true, that it came forth the way Joseph said it came forth and was given to bring happiness and hope to the faithful in the travail of the latter days.”

Some Book of Mormon Examples

No doubt any reader familiar with some of the narrative concepts discussed above (and treated in much more detail in the cited references) will notice new and surprising features when reading Book of Mormon narratives. A book that does exactly this is Richard Rust’s Feasting on the Word: The Literary Testimony of the Book of Mormon (Deseret, 1997). Here are a couple of Book of Mormon examples I have noticed in my own reading.

First, the text is often explicitly aware of a limited point of view. While many titles that we now use to refer to Jesus Christ appear in 1 Nephi and the first chapters of 2 Nephi — such as “the lamb of God” or “the Savior of the world,” both used in 1 Nephi 13:40 — the actual term “Christ” first appears in a first-person statement by Jacob at 2 Nephi 10:3: “Wherefore, as I said unto you, it must needs be expedient that Christ — for in the last night the angel spake unto me that this should be his name — should come among the Jews, among those who are the more wicked part of the world; and they shall crucify him ….” The text here displays awareness that a speaker in the mid-sixth century, unlike a reader in the 19th century, would not know the name of Jesus Christ. A similar narrative device is seen at 2 Nephi 25:19 (where Nephi reports that “according to the words of the prophets, and also the word of the angel of God, his name shall be Jesus Christ, the Son of God”) and at Mosiah 3:8 (where King Benjamin reports that “he shall be called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Father of heaven and earth, the Creator of all things from the beginning; and his mother shall be called Mary,” information that in 3:2 he states was “made known unto me by an angel from God”).

Second, the Book of Mormon does at times use omniscient narration, such as the following passage recounting the sea voyage of the Jaredites. At Ether 6:4-6, Moroni’s narration becomes progressively broader as the passage develops:

4 And it came to pass that when they had prepared all manner of food, that thereby they might subsist upon the water, and also food for their flocks and herds, and whatsoever beast or animal or fowl that they should carry with them — and it came to pass that when they had done all these things they got aboard of their vessels or barges, and set forth into the sea, commending themselves unto the Lord their God.
5 And it came to pass that the Lord God caused that there should be a furious wind blow upon the face of the waters, towards the promised land; and thus they were tossed upon the waves of the sea before the wind.
6 And it came to pass that they were many times buried in the depths of the sea, because of the mountain waves which broke upon them, and also the great and terrible tempests which were caused by the fierceness of the wind.

There are no doubt dozens of examples like these that an attentive reader will notice. What features have you noticed in Book of Mormon narratives?

Notes

1. Lacking a degree in English or literature, I am relying on Chris Baldick’s Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms (OUP, 2d ed., 2001) and Jonathan Culler’s Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction (OUP, 1997), especially Chapter 6, “Narrative,” for terms and concepts. Mary Klages’ Literary Theory: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum Books, 2006) is very good for contrasting structuralism with post-structuralist literary criticism, but provides little discussion of narrative. For a discussion aimed particularly at scriptural narrative, the interested reader is directed to Frank Kermode’s The Genesis of Secrecy: On the Interpretation of Narrative (Harvard Univ. Press, 2006).

2. Edgar C. Snow, Jr., “Narrative Criticism and the Book of Mormon,” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, 1995 (Volume 4, Issue 2), pages 93-106. Quotation from pages 95-96.

3. Mark D. Thomas, Digging in Cumorah: Reclaiming Book of Mormon Narratives, Signature Books, 1999. Quotation from page 2. In Chapter One, Thomas discusses his methodology. In addition to narrative scenes, he considers narrative formulas (such as “once upon a time” and “they lived happily ever after” in fairy tales) and biblical parallels when examining Book of Mormon narratives. For a mildly critical review of the book (“Though better than most other LDS revisionist approaches to the Book of Mormon, Thomas’s book seriously underestimates the complexity of the scripture — whether for ideological reasons or just because of the writer’s incapacities as a literary critic isn’t clear yet.”), see Alan Goff, “Scratching the Surface of Book of Mormon Narratives,” FARMS Review, 2000 (Volume 12, Issue 2), pages 51-82.

4. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (OUP, 2010). Like other treatments discussed above, Hardy brackets questions of authorship and historicity while focusing on the literary and narrative features of the Book of Mormon text.

5. Elder Dallin H. Oaks, “The Historicity of the Book of Mormon,” an address delivered to the 1993 FARMS Annual Dinner in Provo, Utah. Transcript posted at the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship site (linked above), accessed January 27, 2011.

What the Book of Mormon Says About Itself

One place to start is the Title Page to the Book of Mormon itself, which (we are told) is translated text that accompanied the body of the Book of Mormon text. That page tells us that the Book of Mormon is intended to do three things:

1. To inform the descendants of Lehi about the history of their ancestors (Nephites and Lamanites) and that they are descended from the house of Israel;
2. To tell the descendants of Lehi that they are “not cast off forever” and that “they may know the covenants of the Lord,” which complements the first item by making Israelite ancestry not merely an item of historical interest to the descendants of Lehi but a status that activates present-day promises and possibilities; and
3. To proclaim to all readers (“Jew and Gentile”) that Jesus is the Christ and that God reveals himself to all nations.

The third item is general, but the first two items are specific to the descendants of Lehi or, as they are often termed in the text, “the remnant of our seed.” Once upon a time, that designation, along with the promises extended at various places in the Book of Mormon to the descendants of Lehi, was thought to apply to all Native Americans. Under the current understanding — that the descendants of Lehi are actually a small and unidentified portion of the Native American population, the large majority of which are admitted to be of Asiatic descent — the special promises in the Book of Mormon addressed to the descendants of Lehi actually do not apply to most Native Americans. I have not seen this obvious point discussed elsewhere, although it certainly seems like the kind of thing that would be addressed somewhere in the twenty volumes of the Journal of the Book of Mormon and Other Restoration Scripture.

Another source for statements about the purpose of the Book of Mormon is the text itself, such as 1 Nephi 13:40:

And the angel spake unto me, saying: These last records, which thou hast seen among the Gentiles, shall establish the truth of the first, which are of the twelve apostles of the Lamb, and shall make known the plain and precious things which have been taken away from them; and shall make known to all kindreds, tongues, and people, that the Lamb of God is the Son of the Eternal Father, and the Savior of the world; and that all men must come unto him, or they cannot be saved.

This verse gives what I think is a better statement of purpose than the Title Page, specifically noting that the Book of Mormon would:

1. Support the Bible.
2. Restore plain and precious truths that have been removed from the Bible since its texts were originally delivered.
3. Testify to all people that they must come unto Jesus Christ or they cannot be saved.

Interestingly, the items on this list pulled from 1 Nephi 13:40 seem to match up better with the statements about the Book of Mormon one hears in the present LDS curriculum than the items from the Title Page listed earlier.

Recent Views

From the early days of the Church, the Book of Mormon has been used as a sign of the calling and prophetic status of Joseph Smith. That is certainly true for the LDS curriculum today and also for how LDS beliefs are presented in LDS missionary teaching to those who are unfamiliar with LDS doctrine and history. This tight linking of the Book of Mormon with the life and mission of Joseph Smith is nicely illustrated by a quotation from Elder Holland’s October 2009 General Conference talk “Safety for the Soul.” He related how Hyrum Smith recited Ether 12:7-8 to Joseph as they departed Nauvoo to answer legal charges in nearby Carthage (which led to their detention in Carthage Jail and shortly thereafter to their assassination by a disbanded unit of the state militia). Elder Holland continued:

As one of a thousand elements of my own testimony of the divinity of the Book of Mormon, I submit this as yet one more evidence of its truthfulness. In this their greatest—and last—hour of need, I ask you: would these men blaspheme before God by continuing to fix their lives, their honor, and their own search for eternal salvation on a book (and by implication a church and a ministry) they had fictitiously created out of whole cloth?

Never mind that their wives are about to be widows and their children fatherless. Never mind that their little band of followers will yet be “houseless, friendless and homeless” and that their children will leave footprints of blood across frozen rivers and an untamed prairie floor. Never mind that legions will die and other legions live declaring in the four quarters of this earth that they know the Book of Mormon and the Church which espouses it to be true. Disregard all of that, and tell me whether in this hour of death these two men would enter the presence of their Eternal Judge quoting from and finding solace in a book which, if not the very word of God, would brand them as imposters and charlatans until the end of time? They would not do that! They were willing to die rather than deny the divine origin and the eternal truthfulness of the Book of Mormon.

While undeniably appropriate for exhortation and ministry, linking the Book of Mormon so directly to Joseph Smith (or to LDS doctrine in general) can unwittingly deflect attention from the book itself, as noted most recently by Grant Hardy in Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (OUP, 2010):

Most studies tend to mine the text for evidence in larger arguments about the nature of Mormonism as a religious movement or the credibility of its first prophet. … While historians have searched the Book of Mormon for clues about nineteenth-century America or Joseph Smith, Mormon writers have generally focused either on evidence for the book’s historical claims or correlations with LDS theology. And for many Latter-day Saints, careful scrutiny of the volume’s contents is secondary to the direct relationship with God that the book makes possible. Those investigating the faith are encouraged to pray about the Book of Mormon …. Individuals who feel they have received such a spiritual witness are often content to redirect their energies from textual analysis toward living the wholesome sort of lifestyle that Mormonism advocates. (p. xii-xiii.)

So these quotes give some ideas for how the Book of Mormon can be used or should be used. How do you use it? How does it affect your life? What has it done for you lately?

I throw out all of these numbers to suggest that, as a society, we have a problem. That problem needs to be fixed. And we, as Mormons, undoubtedly have something that we can bring to the discussion of how to fix it. As I think about how we can fix poverty, though, I’m hugely influenced by Ron Haskins and Isabel Sawhill’s book Creating an Opportunity Society.[fn3]

Haskins and Sawhill point out that Americans care about desert.[fn4] That is, as Americans, we want those who have the ability to work for a living. And I’m interested in this idea of desert. Because I’m not convinced that we have a religious dispensation to withhold assistance from those don’t somehow “deserve” our help.[fn5]

Still, as a practical matter, irrespective of whether we have religious dispensation or not, we care about desert. And no social program that is blind to to recipients’ refusal to work is going to go anywhere. As a pragmatist, then, I have to confront desert. But, as we consider how to provide aid to those to whom we have the political will to aid, I want to keep two things in mind:

(1) Notwithstanding our cultural faith in Horatio Alger, rags-to-riches is not the norm in America. You are much more likely to end up in roughly the same economic condition as the family you were born into. 42 percent of the children of families in the bottom quintile of income themselves end up in the bottom quintile of income as adults, twice the percentage that would be expected to end up there by chance.[fn7] And only 6 percent of Americans move from the bottom quintile to the top quintile.[fn8]

So Americans’ socioeconomic movement is limited. And this limited mobility between socioeconomic classes suggests that some portion of our economic success or failure is a result of the situation in which we were born, not of anything for which we were responsible. This is not to deny our ability or need to work, but, while some portion of my relatively comfortable financial situation can be attributed to my hard work, some portion is also attributable to the fact that I was born into a middle-class family. Likewise, while some portion of an indigent’s lack of financial success may be attributable to her not working, some portion is also attributable to the bad luck of not being born in a middle-class family. So while looking at a person’s desert has significant emotional and political resonance, we need to recognize that luck and society play their roles, too.

(2) Still, though I think it’s hard to argue with my conclusions in (1), I don’t think that’s going to seep into the public consciousness any time soon. Which is one reason why, if we want to create a truly just society, there is value in focusing on those to whom we can’t assign any blame for their situation. And here, I basically mean children. Because children can’t be held responsible for their poverty—that is, because they didn’t have the ability to opt out of being born in poverty—providing them with some sort of help should be uncontroversial, even to the most desert-focused person.[fn9]

—

So this could go in one of several directions. If you believe my story that, as Mormons, we’re not given religious dispensation to only help the deserving poor, maybe the question is, how do we expand Americans’ view of who is the deserving poor (again, assuming that the political importance of desert isn’t going to go away)? If you don’t buy my story, then maybe the question is, how do we make sure that those who need and deserve our help get that help? Either way, there’s always the question of how much help to give. What, for example, does it mean that, among the people of Enoch, there were no poor among them? Assuming it doesn’t preclude all income inequality,[fn10] we need to determine how much inequality we can leave. Etc.

—

[fn1] Note that the poverty line, for these purposes, is $22,314 for a family of four, or $11,139 for an individual.

[fn2] If you go to the Wall Street Journal link, I recommend clicking on the interactive map. The variation between the percentage of people in a state receiving food stamps is interesting. I haven’t looked carefully, but in my quick glance, Wyoming has the lowest proportion of food stamp recipients, with 6%, while Mississippi has the most, with 21%.

[fn3] I’m not going to review their book, although I will refer to it and concepts it embraces. I highly recommend it to anybody who wants to think through how we can solve poverty. The two authors have different views—my impression is that one is politically liberal and the other, conservative—but they work to lay out a concrete way that the country could work to reduce poverty without being ideological about it. Because—and this is an important point—neither liberals nor conservatives like poverty, as far as I can tell, and both are interested in solving the problem. Their policy prescriptions may differ, but both seem to want a society that is more just.

[fn4] Note that, in this case, “desert” takes one “s.” Why not two? This Snopes article discusses it. (Did you know, by the way, that Snopes also tackled language myths and mistakes? Me either.)

[fn5] For example, take a look at the parable of the workers in the vineyard. Or maybe King Benjamin explaining that we are to give to the beggar, whether or not she brought her poverty on herself, in the same way God gives to us, lest we be condemned. But contrast that with the Lord’s statement that the idle shall not eat the bread of the worker (although, to be fair, this is the Lord commanding those who enter into the law of consecration not to be idle; it’s not the Lord excusing His people from being charitable. Still, I’ll concede that there may be some wiggle room).

[fn7] That is, if we had complete socioeconomic mobility, with no constraints based on our family of origin, a person who grew up in the bottom 20% of income should have an equal likelihood of ending up in any quintile; only 20% would end up in the bottom quintile of income.

[fn8] These numbers all come from Opportunity Society p. 63.

[fn9] Yes, I know I said my next post in this series would probably deal with New York’s recent sex ed law. But this really belongs first. So probably next time I’m addressing social justice issues, I’ll deal with sex ed. If you’re really disappointed that something came between that post and sex ed, you can pretend this post never happened.

[fn10] I assume it doesn’t eliminate all income inequality—it appears to me that, even under at least one formulation of the United Order, people received according to their needs, which may have been different between individuals and families.

7.  Do you worry that some of the “unsettling” aspects of the book (e.g., your frankness concerning the anachronistic Isaiah passages or New Testament linguistic influences or stylistic similarities between all three books of restoration scripture) will have a negative impact on the faith of some of your Mormon readers?

No, I don’t. The Book of Mormon is what it is; I don’t feel like I need to apologize for it or try to hide its more troubling features. That would seem like a failure of nerve or a lack of faith, and it seems to me that there are enough wonderful things about the text to balance out the things that seem strange or unsettling. As believers, we should read it as carefully as possible, and we should bring to our study the best biblical and historical scholarship available, but there is enough theological flexibility to accommodate whatever we might find. For people who accept the book as scripture, it is almost as if it comes with something like the standard addendum to political ads: “I am Jesus Christ and I approve of this message, in these words.” I don’t always understand why the Book of Mormon takes the form it does, but who am I to say, for instance, that “God would never use poor grammar in a revelation” or “God would never allow historical anachronisms into his perfect word,” Similarly, I was a bit disappointed to hear that Christian Vuissa’s new film Joseph Smith – Volume 1: Plates of Gold didn’t at least briefly and tactfully portray Joseph using a seer stone in a hat (especially since Vuissa has handled difficult issues quite nicely in some of his previous films). It is time for us as Latter-day Saints to get over our embarrassment and embrace that well-documented and widely-reported aspect of our heritage. It may seem odd by today’s standards, but if that is how the Lord chose to communicate with his prophet, why should we try to conceal or ignore the facts? And who knows, sometimes weaknesses turn into strengths.

With regard to some of the specific issues mentioned in the question, the presence of Second Isaiah in the Book of Mormon is one of the strongest arguments against its historicity, but Latter-day Saints should recognize that ideas about Second Isaiah are among the most widely accepted  in all of biblical scholarship; to dismiss the scrupulous work of generations of fine, often devout scholars with a simple “Well, they just don’t believe in prophecy” is both arrogant and foolish. It is very much like rejecting evolution because it doesn’t fit your particular interpretation of Genesis. You can either show some respect for evidence, argumentation, and scholarship, or you can withdraw into fundamentalism. I’m not exactly sure how Adam and Eve fit into the scientific story of human origins, just as I’m not quite sure how to explain Nephi’s quoting of Isaiah 48-49, but I trust that there is some reasonable explanation (though it may require the sort of divine intervention that only believers would accept). By the way, even if scholars were to discover evidence that led them to revise their opinions and date Isaiah 40-55 as pre-exilic, the Book of Mormon is still in trouble, because careful analysis suggests that even chapters 1-39 (quoted at length by Nephi in something quite close to their current KJV form) underwent considerable revision and augmentation after 600 BCE.  Similar things could be said about New Testament phrasing. Why try to deny or downplay what is so obviously there for all to see? Let’s evaluate the evidence as fairly and open-mindedly as possible, and then we can figure out later what it might mean or how believers might account for it. (See again the last paragraph in question #6 above.)

8.  Similarly, the Book of Mormon editors and prophets as you disclose them are quite human – perhaps uncomfortably human. What, in your opinion, does this say about prophets generally, and specifically our prophets today?

Earlier this year, Peggy Fletcher Stack wrote an article in the Salt Lake Tribune in which she stated that “Mormons don’t use the term ‘infallibility’ to refer to their leaders and readily acknowledge that they are imperfect men. In practice, though, LDS belief comes awfully close to that standard.” I’m not sure that this is healthy. A close reading of the Book of Mormon (or the Old Testament) will show that regarding prophets as infallible goes directly against the whole force of the narrative. I believe with Joseph Smith that “a prophet is a prophet only when he is acting as such.” At the same time, the Book of Mormon also stresses the need for generosity and humility toward divinely-appointed leaders who are doing the best they can to lead with inspiration in sometimes trying times. Perhaps reading the scriptures more attentively can help us better balance our reactions to those who have been called of God in our own day.

9.  Despite these and other aspects that might be unsettling to the faithful, there seems to be a general consensus that this book is much more palatable for Mormons than non-Mormons. Consequently, how well do you think you succeeded in your attempt to give your two audiences a “neutral ground” on which to discuss the Book of Mormon? Given the difficulty of both the task and the current climate, can faithful Mormons really reach out to non-Mormons on the subject of our scripture without alienating or turning them off, especially if we stop anywhere short of simply granting their claims concerning the absurdity of belief in the Book of Mormon?

It seems like I have been answering this question all along, but I’ll add a bit more here. Perhaps in order to facilitate discussions between Mormon and non-Mormons, it will be necessary for outsiders to acknowledge that the Book of Mormon can be seen as a rich, complex, coherent work of religious literature (that’s the point I’m pushing in my book; I’m happy for non-believers to remain non-believers, I just think that the Book of Mormon deserves a little more respect). On the other hand, Latter-day Saints who wish to participate in academic conversations will probably need to recognize that belief in the Book of Mormon as revelation or as ancient history does seem absurd to reasonable, even sympathetic outsiders. I personally believe that the Book of Mormon had its origins in the ancient world based on my interpretation of the evidence, but also because of my religious background and spiritual experiences that are outside the realm of academic discourse. I don’t expect that people with different backgrounds and experiences will interpret the literary or historical evidence in the same way. But I am still interested in what they have to say (for instance, Krister Stendahl’s essay on the Third Nephi is one of my favorite articles on the Book of Mormon ever).

I don’t really know if this sort of flexibility on both sides will eventually lead to better conversations. Nevertheless, it’s clearly up to Latter-day Saints to make the first move, that is, to make a case that the Book of Mormon is an interesting text that will repay close attention, that it is worth reading even if you’re not looking for conversion. We can’t expect outsiders to read our scripture more closely than we ourselves have done (and if you want to see what close reading looks like, you can start with the mainstream biblical scholarship that Mormons have avoided for so long).

10.  As Sam notes, when most of us read the Book of Mormon, we can’t help but read 180 years of tradition into the text. One of the most enjoyable aspects of your book is the new and often refreshing ways that you read “against the grain.” What has been the single most helpful tool for you in overcoming the cultural constraints under which we so often approach the text?

There are a several tools that have helped me to see new things in the Book of Mormon. (1) I try to read widely in history, literature, philosophy, biblical scholarship, and religious studies, and I’m always on the lookout for ideas that might be applicable to Mormon scripture. For instance, outsiders often regard the Book of Mormon as a forgery of sorts, but forgeries can be interesting, and I have recently discovered that even imaginary forgeries can be compelling—read Arthur Phillips delightful new novel The Tragedy of Arthur with the Book of Mormon in mind.  If study time is limited in your life—as it is for most people—you might start with the New Oxford Annotated Bible; the introductions and general essays offer a crash course in biblical scholarship, and after you’ve read through the Bible in the New Revised Standard Version, aided by the focus provided by brief annotations, not only will you know the Bible better than most other Latter-day Saints, you will also have all kinds of ideas about how to approach the Book of Mormon. (2) I use an old Infobases program from 1992 (“LDS Scriptures Infobase”) that allows me to track specific words and phrases in the standard works quickly and precisely. I’m interested in identifying connections and allusions, as well analyzing patterns of usage. For example, the phrase “son of man” occurs 196 times in the Bible, but only once in the Book of Mormon (and that is in a direct quotation of Isaiah 51:12). I’m not sure what that means, but it is potentially interesting. (3) My most important tool though, as I noted above, is the Reader’s Edition, which offers a fresh perspective as I encounter familiar words and phrases in a new format that emphasizes narrative continuity and context. That version does the initial work that readers must otherwise do for themselves (rather laboriously) of figuring out which sentences go together in paragraphs, who is saying what to whom, identifying where there are changes in topic or transitions from narrative to commentary to inserted documents to sermons, etc. When all of that is readily apparent, readers can then focus more easily on finding connections or narrative gaps, or looking for subtle shifts of tone.  If you read through the Reader’s Edition, from beginning to end, I guarantee that you too will see things that you have never noticed before.

11.  Dave wrote: “while his criticisms are definitively held to be insightful and productive, his prescription for how to go beyond the limitations of historical criticism and properly elicit meaning and interpretation from history-like or realistic narrative is rather unclear, at least in Eclipse. So when Hardy states that Frei ‘argued that narratives can be understood by their own logic and on their own terms rather than by constant reference to external standards of truth’ (p. 153), that should be the opening statement to a longer discussion of what Hardy understands as Frei’s method for establishing such an understanding or meaning, or for Hardy to set forth his own method for establishing such an understanding or meaning.” Would you take the time now to briefly set forth your methodology on this point, or otherwise respond to the invitation?

The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative is an important, provocative, and sometimes rather dense work. I had not intended to offer a detailed response to it in Understanding, which would have taken my book far off course, but rather I pulled out one significant idea—that post-Enlightenment attempts to understand scripture by reference to external referents (as in the historical-critical method or as embodiments of general moral principles) can distort or obscure the meaning that comes from the stories themselves. Frei is a careful scholar—for instance, his term “history-like narratives” intentionally blurs the line between history and fiction—and while he acknowledges the power of historical criticism, which makes it impossible for thoughtful readers to return to pre-critical approaches, he at the same time realizes that something is lost when we can no longer read the Bible on its own terms. Frei’s work is historical and descriptive rather than prescriptive, so as Dave notes, he does not offer a clear path forward, though others have taken up the challenge. The emergence of the fields of biblical narrative criticism and narrative theology in the last few decades is in many ways a response to Frei’s documentation of a major shift in Western thought in the 18th and 19th centuries.

For my purposes, the important thing is that Frei resisted any general hermeneutical theories. He cogently identified problems in contemporary biblical interpretation, but then intentionally left open the question of how to reconnect to the indispensable narrative character of scripture (though he does a little more with this in his later books—his image of an eclipse suggests that we might someday come out of the shadow). Frei recognized that the Bible is a strange book, which  makes unusual demands on its readers, and this is also true of the Book of Mormon. In Understanding, I tried to implement Frei’s notion that the meaning of a narrative is the narrative itself (or that the meaning emerges cumulatively from the text), by giving close attention to what the Book of Mormon actually says and how it says it. At this point I think it would be a mistake to try to develop a general theory of interpretation based on philosophical, historiographical, or literary considerations. It seems to me that what we need right now is not abstract theorizing but better and more accurate descriptions of how the text works, how it is organized, how it makes its points, and how it employs language. (Not surprisingly, I’m a huge fan of Royal Skousen’s painstakingly detailed textual and linguistic analyses.)

We can certainly learn from scholars of the Bible such as Frei, Alter, and Sternberg, but the Book of Mormon is in many ways a very different book, which makes its own way through a whole series of religious issues. It seemed to reaffirm traditional modes of biblical interpretation (literalism, typology, prophecy, salvation history, and canonical authority) at the very time that the Christian consensus about how to read the Bible was collapsing. The Nephite scripture—with its near absence of standard archaeological-historical evidence—ends up promoting pre-critical approaches (but not exactly), while its multivocal, deconstructable narratives sound almost postmodern (but not quite). Richard Bushman once suggested that “read in the twenty-first century, the book seems almost postmodern in its self-conscious attention to the production of the text” (Rough Stone Rolling, p. 87), but this doesn’t exactly capture it. Despite the Book of Mormon’s perspectivism (and self-awareness of such), it is all about meta-narratives and un-ironic truth. What an odd, engaging text!

12.  Everyone is of course curious about what you might be working on now – particularly anything Book of Mormon related. Any hints for us?

I took some time off from Mormon Studies to co-edit the first volume of the Oxford History of Historical Writing and to create a thirty-six lecture CD/DVD course for the Teaching Company entitled Great Minds of the Eastern Intellectual Tradition (both of which were released earlier this year), but now I’m anxious to start working on the Book of Mormon again. I was hoping in Understanding to identify some common ground between believers and outsiders as they analyze the way the book is structured and how it presents its message. The more important question, however, is what exactly that message might be. (My concern here is academic rather than religious; I’m not so much interested in persuading outsiders of the book’s ultimate meaning or truth as in analyzing what the book claims for itself.) It seems to me that one of the main purposes of the Book of Mormon is to clarify and resolve ambiguities in the Bible. In other words, it is, among other things, a fairly serious work of theology. I’ve sketched out an outline for a volume with chapters on the closed canon, Deuteronomistic history, rational religion (including the challenge of Deism), the delayed Parousia, salvation history, soteriology, ecclesiology, the destiny of the house of Israel, and so on. Many of these were important issues in the nineteenth century, while others go back to debates found in the New Testament itself, and still others come to prominence in the twentieth century.

Once again, perhaps naively, I’m hoping to find some common ground.  The characters in the Book of Mormon obviously respond to the Bible, which was part of Joseph Smith’s culture but which also has a presence within the narrative framework—in the Brass Plates, in Nephi’s vision, and in Jesus’ sermons to the Nephites. And while there is no question that the Book of Mormon addresses nineteenth-century concerns (otherwise, it would never have gained a following), I will try to leave open the question of whether it does so as a result of Joseph Smith’s own thinking, his inspiration, God’s direct revelation, or the visions and foreknowledge of ancient prophets. Regardless of ideas of origins, it seems to me that careful readers should be able to agree on the main points of Book of Mormon theology, and I’m optimistic that I might be able to persuade outsiders that Joseph Smith was an observant student of the Bible and an innovative, perhaps even prescient, theological thinker. (It shouldn’t be a stretch for Latter-day Saints to accept that the Book of Mormon adds something significant to the biblical witness, but what, exactly?) Still, don’t expect anything from me in the near future. I work at a university with a heavy teaching load, I have the privilege of serving in a rather demanding church calling, and this project will require a lot of reading in biblical scholarship, theology, and religious history. In addition, I’m sure I will end up rewriting the manuscript many times before I’m ready to publish. But to me this sounds like a great way to spend the next several years. The Book of Mormon continues to be a vital, fascinating text in both my life and my scholarship—a statement that can serve as a concluding testimony of sorts.

1.  Can you tell us a bit about the background to this book? What inspired you to begin this type of project? Were there any prior works that were a critical influence for you? What sort of process did you go through to write the book? What were the biggest challenges in writing it?

Understanding the Book of Mormon is a sequel to an earlier project, The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition, which was published by the University of Illinois Press in 2003. As I was reformatting the text in the manner of modern biblical translations (with paragraphs, topical headings, poetic stanzas, quotation marks, indented documents, and so forth), I came to a better understanding of how the Book of Mormon is structured, and particularly the crucial role played by the major narrators. Reading in context, with an eye toward the editing of the narrators, uncovered interpretive layers and nuances that seemed to make the Book of Mormon a much more interesting work than many have assumed, both inside and outside the Church. So in a sense, Understanding the Book of Mormon is a set of field notes on the Reader’s Edition. (I was pleased by Rosalynde Welch’s observation that the Reader’s Edition is the more important of the two books. I agree. The particular arguments in Understanding will always be subject to debate and revision, but the Reader’s Edition could be a starting point for a new generation of Book of Mormon scholarship.)

In addition, it seemed to me that a narrative-based approach might offer some common ground between insiders and outsiders. Regardless of whether one views Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni as ancient prophet/historians or as fictional characters invented by Joseph Smith, they are presented in the Book of Mormon as playing a crucial role in selecting and shaping its contents. Too often, believers and critics alike get so wound up in trying to prove or disprove historicity that they cite  a few verses and then almost immediately get sidetracked by ancient Near Eastern or nineteenth-century parallels. As a result they end up not really reading the text at all. Similarly, a great deal of what passes for commentary from faithful Latter-day Saints is little more than paraphrase, with regular references to conference talks and gospel principles. None of these approaches lend themselves to careful, comprehensive readings. I myself am a believer who accepts the existence of ancient Nephites, but I’m not offended or threatened by those who see things differently, and indeed I think that there is much to learn from astute readers of any religious persuasion (or lack thereof). In many ways, I wish that outsiders would take the Book of Mormon more seriously as fiction, and that Latter-day Saints would take it more seriously as history.

My models in this endeavor were Robert Alter and Meir Sternberg, who analyze the Hebrew Bible from a narrative perspective while at the same time acknowledging the contributions made by historical-critical scholarship. It is probably not coincidental that they are both Jewish. Over the last half century, Latter-day Saints have come under the sway of evangelical or even fundamentalist Protestants in the way that we approach scripture. I’m not sure that this is a positive development, and it certainly does not seem to be a necessary part of being true to our tradition (whatever Joseph Smith may have been, he was not a fundamentalist). I have often asked myself, Why can’t Mormons be more like Jews?

As for writing Understanding itself, it was more a matter of rewriting. I would start with a few ideas from my own reading and from conversations with my wife Heather, who is a much better reader than I am, and then I would write a quick draft that would then be the subject of weeks, if not months of additional conversations (Heather is a gifted editor as well). The most difficult chapter was the one on Third Nephi, which went through eight complete revisions before I finally got something we were satisfied with. As might be expected in a book that concentrates on formal analysis, the form of Understanding was important to me. I wanted something that would lead readers through the main events and characters of the Book of Mormon from 1 Nephi to Moroni, as well as something that focused on the narrators, where every chapter also introduced and illustrated some specific, representative literary technique.

2.  Tell us about your relationship with Oxford? What sort of a process did you go through to get this book published?

The process of getting a book published with Oxford is the same as with any other academic press. After the manuscript was finished I sent a proposal to the religion editor at Oxford (OUP was the first press I contacted, largely because they had recently published Terryl Givens’ By the Hand of Mormon), and she was interested enough to ask to see the entire manuscript, which she  then sent to outside readers who are experts in the field. The readers’ reports were mixed, as they often are, with there being some concern that I was simply assuming historicity, which would make the work more devotional than academic. I think that it is possible to bracket the historicity question, at least temporarily, and I believe there are strong arguments on both sides— indeed, if I weren’t LDS, I would most certainly regard the Book of Mormon as religious fiction, or as a fascinating, modern example of pseudepigrapha—but somehow that didn’t come through as I intended. So I rewrote the manuscript yet again, deleting passages that might be misinterpreted and adding more parallel examples from fictional works that bear some similarity to the Book of Mormon. Oxford sent the revised manuscript to additional readers, including non-Mormons, and they were quite positive in their assessments, so contracts were signed, copyediting commenced, and the printing presses started to roll.

3.  Have you been disappointed, encouraged, or neither by your book’s reception?

The book’s reception is still unfolding. More than disappointment or encouragement, I have felt surprise that my work hasn’t attracted more attention, particularly from Latter-day Saint sources. After all, this is the first academic book on the contents of the Book of Mormon, and Oxford is not a marginal press. I would have thought that Mormons would have been more engaged with a text they hold sacred, which many read from nearly every day. I do understand that reviews often take a while to appear in print, but Understanding the Book of Mormon was released more than a year and a half ago and there still have not been many formal responses—a few book notices, on-line reviews from Blair Holmes and Rosalynde Welch, a Dialogue review by Julie M. Smith (the last two were recently reprinted in Times and Seasons), and a review by Terryl Givens in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History. But nothing substantive in Sunstone, BYU Studies, or in any of the publications of the Maxwell Institute. I expect that full reviews from BYU will appear eventually, but I’m puzzled by the slow pace. Most authors would rather be criticized than ignored, and I tried to give readers plenty to talk about.

There have been two particularly interesting responses from non-Mormons. The first was a review in the on-line magazine Slate by Alan Wolfe, a highly-respected commentator on the contemporary American religious scene. My analysis persuaded Wolfe that the Book of Mormon does have a complicated, coherent structure, and in fact he went back to the text to give it another try. In the end, he still didn’t see it as having much literary merit, but I was delighted that my work had encouraged him to take a fresh look. I did not expect to convince everyone, though I was hoping to make easy, off-hand dismissals of the Book of Mormon less academically respectable. The other unexpected response has come from the Community of Christ. Last month I was invited to give a presentation in Nauvoo at a meeting of Midwestern leaders, including two of their apostles, and I was pleasantly surprised to discover that nearly everyone in attendance—some fifty people—had read my book. It appears that there are many in that Restorationist denomination who are looking for ways to better utilize the Book of Mormon as scripture, while still acknowledging the serious historical problems of the text. I was thrilled that they were willing to reach out to a Latter-day Saint for advice on the Book of Mormon, and I would be quite pleased if they found my literary approach useful in better understanding a scripture that we have in common.

4.  Much in our reviews focused on your attempt to write to two audiences and fruitfully bring them together in exploring the Book of Mormon. Tell us what it is that you’re most hopeful that the Mormon audience will take from this book. What is your main message (and any subsidiary ones you want to mention) to the faithful?

I’m not sure that my approach will bring together insiders and outsiders when they explore the Book of Mormon—our interpretations of what the book ultimately means and where it comes from will always be far apart. But it seems to me that it should be possible to come to some agreement on how the book is structured, on what is says, and what it claims for itself. And I would hope that all readers, regardless of why they come to the text, would be able to agree that despite the awkward diction and repetitions, the book is not nonsense. It shows evidence of careful composition, for instance in the chronological flashbacks and the smooth handling of the frequent but irregular notices of the beginnings and endings of years of the judges. That is simply in the text, objectively.

For Latter-day Saints, I hope that my work will encourage them to see the Book of Mormon as more than just a sign of Joseph Smith’s prophetic calling. The contents matter as much as the book’s mere existence. Too often we don’t really read the Book of Mormon, preferring instead to skim it for proof-texts of principles that we know from elsewhere. Yet it seems incredibly important to me that the book was written as narrative rather than as a collection of propositional truths like Gospel Principles. Close readings, within the book’s multi-layered, thick contexts, often reveal lessons and insights that can help us become more Christ-like, even after we have been converted by Moroni’s promise. I try to apply a critical, questioning mode of reading that, while staying within the parameters of the narrative, allow us to identify and interpret connections, seams, and disjunctions. Indeed, this is along the lines of the way that historians read texts, and I often wish that Latter-day Saints treated figures from the Book of Mormon as if they were real individuals, with distinctive personalities and concerns, who struggle to articulate their ideas persuasively, and who develop over time. Instead, we too often claim the book as history and then read it as inspirational myth. I would also like Mormons to understand the important ways in which the Book of Mormon is not like the Bible (which may well increase our appreciation for both).

5.  Tell us why you think non-Mormons ought to be interested in this book. If you’re not interested in evangelizing them, what, beyond mere trivia, will the kind of close reading you put on display do for them? Why should they care?

This question comes up regularly and I’m always a bit puzzled by it. People who ask why anyone would care about a religious tradition that is not their own probably need to get out a little more. The Book of Mormon is one of the most significant books in American religious history and in recent world scripture. But this is not to jump up and down and insist that everyone should pay attention to us. The real question is, How interested are you in other religions and philosophies? Have you ever read the Qur’an? Why? Can you name half a dozen books from the Apocrypha? Are you interested in studies of the Daodejing or the Yoga Sutra? Have you ever wondered what the appeal was of Tibetan treasure texts? Are you excited about the other volumes in the Princeton’s “Lives of Great Religious Books” series? (I mean besides the forthcoming one on the Book of Mormon, written by the non-Mormon scholar Paul Gutjahr). If not, then you have no business asking people to care about your book, unless you are targeting them as potential converts. But those who are curious about the varieties of religious experience will at some point or other be interested in the Book of Mormon, and we have not made it easy for them. Simply put, the book is not easy to read or appreciate, particularly in the official, double-columned, verse-by-verse format.

In academics, there is a long tradition of monographs on significant texts that are easier to read than the texts themselves. For instance, I’m reading Spinoza’s Ethics right now, but only because I have already read a couple of studies that convinced me the book is worth my time and that explained its organization, main ideas, and significance. In the past, there has not been a detailed, academic introduction to the contents of the Book of Mormon. I’m afraid that our scripture will generally be a tough slog for those who do not already accept it as revelation, but people who make it all the way through Understanding will come away knowing the Book of Mormon better than many Latter-day Saints do. There will always be scholars of US history, or religious studies, or sacred texts, or American literature who would like to know about the Book of Mormon, or who at least feel an obligation to have some basic understanding of it. My book will give them access to what might otherwise be an opaque, bewildering text. By the same token, if there were some insider who could explain the Bahá’í scriptures to me, I would be most grateful; I’m always interested in the best, most persuasive readings that believers can come up with. (By the way, there has been some terrific work done lately on the Sikh’s Adi Granth, which is the most successful new scripture of the last few centuries, as measured by the number of adherents. The Book of Mormon comes in second.)

6.  Over the course of the week much was said about the modern subjectivity that your reading imparts to the three main editors (see particularly Rosalynde’s critique here). Can we really expect ancient subjects whose worlds are so very different than our own to have left such a coherent and familiar picture of who they were, their motives, goals, and stylistic elements? And doesn’t your answer to this question directly bear on the historicity debate?

Rosalynde’s review highlighted a new, significant critique of my narrator-based analysis, for which I’m grateful, but before I respond to her specific objection, let me make a few general comments. I was somewhat surprised (but then again, not really), by how much of the discussion in the essays and comments about my book at Times & Seasons were concerned with historicity.

This is the way that Latter-day Saints and their critics primarily approach the Book of Mormon, and it can be hard to imagine doing anything else. But I don’t think this is a burning issue for most academics—for them the book is obviously fiction, which doesn’t make it any less interesting. Try to imagine things from the other side.

For example, I think that the Mahabharata is a fascinating epic of great cultural, philosophical, and religious significance. I have read books about its textual history, its complex organization, and its themes. Yet there are some Hindus to whom it is of paramount importance whether the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas actually happened, or whether Krishna was or was not an actual historical figure. You can follow their arguments about dating the war based on astronomical references or about the significance of finding the submerged city of Dwarka in the 1980s, but such issues don’t matter much to me. While it can be intriguing to see how believers try to adapt their faith to the challenges of modernity, the reality of Hindu gods is not really a live option for me at this point, and the evidences put forward don’t even come close to what it would take to persuade me to take such claims seriously. (From the outside, a lot of Mormon apologetics looks something like this. I am deeply interested in the epic, but arguments about its historicity seem peripheral, parochial, or even a little silly. So I believe that it is possible to decouple close literary analysis from the question of ancient Nephites. Don’t get me wrong; taking historical contexts into consideration is one important way to read scripture (it does make a difference whether you view the Book of Mormon as a product of the ancient world or nineteenth century), but it’s not the only way to read, or even the most fruitful way. Perhaps Mormon scholars need to spend more time with their colleagues in religious studies departments.

The Book of Mormon presents a problem for religiously neutral readings though, because it was written by dictation, one time through, over the course of just three months. So any complex coherence can be taken as evidence of divine intervention rather than human composition. Latter-day Saints are very quick to jump to the conclusion that “Joseph Smith could not have written this.” But that wasn’t the point of my book, and I don’t think that arguments based on complexity are particularly compelling to outsiders. Could Joseph Smith have kept the lineage of Jaredite kings straight in both Ether 1 and then in reverse order in chapters 6-11? Perhaps, if he had worked things out beforehand and then used a mnemonic memory palace to be able to recall them forwards and backwards, but in any case, there are all kinds of astonishing human achievements in music, or math, or athletics that seem completely beyond the reach of ordinary mortals. That doesn’t prove that Mozart or Ramanujan or Michael Jordan had divine assistance. I was sincere when I talked about bracketing the issue of historicity, and I deliberately tried to leave respectful space for various ideas about origins of the Book of Mormon.

Rosalynde takes up the question of historicity, but from the opposite end. To her, my reconstruction of the narrators makes them seem too modern for an ancient work. I’m sympathetic with this. I have often wondered if the Book of Mormon just isn’t strange enough to be an ancient text.  Again, such subjective judgments are hardly conclusive, but the plainness of the book could be a point against its historicity. Rosalynde makes a much more specific argument, about the distinctively modern self-consciousness and self-presentation of the narrators. There are several possible responses. The first is to point to a few ancient authors who do appear to write from a coherent sense of self—people like Plato, Herodotus, Thucydides, and Sima Qian. Modern minds, and even autobiographical perspectives, did not absolutely begin with Augustine or Rousseau. (The point here is not simply first-person narration; it’s more a matter of having motivations, notions of autonomy, a sense of audience, and a feel for how one is positioned within a literary tradition— all of which must be intelligible to moderns; see Ben Huff’s essay.) Second, I could acknowledge James Olsen’s suggestion (comment #13) that perhaps I have read modern sensibilities into my interpretations of Book of Mormon narrators. It’s quite possible, though there is always a delicate balance in reading old texts (we are still talking about historicity, right?) between recognizing the real differences between how moderns and ancients mentally construct the world and their own identities—what aspects are mutable, what counts as evidence, what sorts of assumptions go unquestioned—and concerns that are universal across time and space, without which, there would be no chance of cross-cultural communication. It would be odd, in most cultures, that Nephi talks incessantly about his descendants but never about his own children, particularly the sons that presumably would succeed him as king. Or third, I could argue that perhaps Nephi and his prophetic successors were rather unique—that their implicit canon (the brass plates), their conversations with the Lord, and their sense of writing for readers many centuries in the future gave them a subjective sensibility that was quite distinct from other ancient authors.

In the end, I suspect that it is the Nephites’ religious assumptions that seem the most suspiciously modern, and perhaps the most satisfying answer for believers is to assume that this is a function of the translation, or of posthumous editing by narrators working on the other side of the veil, or that it is the result of extraordinary revelation. All of these are supernatural explanations that I would not expect outsiders to take seriously, but as for me, I actually believe in angels and translation by seer stones. Rosalynde’s question makes me want to read the Book of Mormon through again, looking for evidence of how the narrators think about the world and their place within it. It could be the subject of a whole book.

And frankly, using the casebook isn’t a bad short-term decision. The casebook explains what the Code provisions mean and how they’re applied, at least in simple situations.But in the longer term, relying on the casebook’s explanation does my students a disservice. While it helps them be able to answer my questions in class, and while it likely helps them do decently on my exams, if they rely on the casebook at the expense of reading through and struggling with the Code, they don’t develop their skills in reading and understanding the Internal Revenue Code. Ultimately, while their casebook helps them understand the tax law on a surface level (and, for that matter, provides a necessary starting point), if they’ve read the casebook at the expense of reading the Code, they’re going to be in trouble when my final asks them to read and apply a Code section that we never read in class.[fn2]

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, we often suffer from a similar problem in approaching the Book of Mormon. Not that we ignore the Book of Mormon—as a Church, we seem to have done a remarkable job responding to prophetic encouragement to open the book and read. But I’m not convinced that we’re reading the text so much as we are reading the 180 years of tradition that have grown up around the text. That is to say, I’ve been familiar with Book of Mormon stories since at least Primary. And generally, I’ve heard the same lessons derived from the same stories, and it’s hard not to think about those lessons as I read the stories.

I’m not suggesting that we eliminate our current reading methodology—I suspect that our narrative familiarity with the Book of Mormon helps us slog through the chloroform-y parts.[fn3] Still, sometimes I think the common knowledge we’ve grown up gets in the way of our engaging the text.

In Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide, Grant Hardy provides a method to read against our accumulated tradition and a sustained example of such a reading. And the result, as others have noted, is virtuosic, a self-contained exegetical reading of (virtually[fn4]) the entire Book of Mormon.[fn5] But in its virtuosity, his work is not replicable, at least by most of us. Or at least by me—I have to find time to study my scriptures around work, paying attention to my wife and my daughters, cooking, cleaning, blogging, and millions of other things. I probably could, if I devoted the time, do a careful reading of the whole Book of Mormon. But I probably won’t, at least not for the next, say, 15 years.

So is there any value to me—and to those of you in my situation—in Hardy’s book, other than giving us a pretty, self-contained, really cool reading of the Book of Mormon? It takes some work, but using Hardy’s insights doesn’t have to involve an extended analysis of the whole Book of Mormon. It can be equally valuable in helping us engage with smaller chunks of the text.

Generally, to the extent that we, as a Church, have an exegetical approach to the Book of Mormon, I think we take Nephi’s explanation of his approach to scriptures as normative. Note that, if we look at Nephi’s narrative intentions—and we believe Nephi understood himself to be writing scripture—then we can infer from his narratological intentions that he intends for us to read what he wrote in order to apply it to ourselves. We can read it that way, or we can read against his grain.

And I’m not suggesting that that’s not a good interpretive regime, just that, if we only use the scriptures to apply them to ourselves, we miss part of the depth and fullness of the scriptures. With the Book of Mormon, though, we don’t have a lot of the tools that could be brought to bear in reading the Bible or the D&C (e.g., archeological knowledge, historical knowledge of what was going on at the time, manuscripts of various ages, alternate traditions, separate authors writing about the same events, etc.). Hardy provides a formalist reading methodology that doesn’t require any of these external informations, making it especially suited to our reading of the Book of Mormon.[fn6]

—

[fn1] A “casebook” is basically the law school version of a textbook.

[fn2] And more importantly, they’re going to be in more trouble when a client or partner asks them about some section not covered in their casebook.

[fn3] Although I frankly don’t have a lot of sympathy for poor Mr. Twain. If he truly wants chloroform, he should try his hand at the Code, offering memoranda for various investment funds, most prospectuses, or any number of non-tax legislative regimes. On the other hand, since he’s now dead, he probably won’t.

[fn4] As others have mentioned, Hardy focuses on the three main narrators/editors of the Book of Mormon: Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. But the Small Plate of Nephi section of the Book of Mormon ends with several short narrations by recordkeepers other than the Big 3. Hardy doesn’t really concern himself with these secondary narrators. Nor should he—none of them really provide enough text or context to provide a significant worldview. Nonetheless, it’s an area wide open to a critical reading along the lines Hardy demonstrates.

[fn5] Others in this series have done an excellent job analyzing what Hardy does in his book; in super-broad terms, he looks at the three main editor-authors and, from the way they  structure their writings, infers what their goals are. He then analyzes what they’ve included and excluded in order to understand why they’ve included what they’ve included.

[fn6]And yes, I get the irony in my saying that we can profitably apply Hardy’s book to our own reading of the Book of Mormon to get beyond applying the Book of Mormon to ourselves.

Grant Hardy, in his new book Understanding the Book of Mormon, wants to uncouple the problems of historicity and literary merit. He brackets the first, setting aside the apologetic debates that have dominated Book of Mormon studies over the past four decades. Instead, he turns his attention to the content of the book, and in particular to its peculiar stylistic qualities—and on this matter if he is no apologist he is nevertheless a bit apologetic, conceding the book’s literary deficiencies but pleading on its behalf that, to borrow a Twainism, the Book of Mormon is “better than it sounds” (273).

Hardy seeks to rehabilitate the literary reputation of the Book of Mormon by drawing attention to what he calls its “organizing principle”: “the fact that it presents itself as the work of narrators with distinct voices and perspectives” (268). Because the Book of Mormon is structured as the product of three discrete narrative voices—Nephi’s, Mormon’s and Moroni’s—and because, according to its own internal claims, the three narrative voices work with a variety earlier sources, the text is always inhabited by at least two minds, Joseph’s and, say, Mormon’s, and often by three or even four. This textual complexity offers an entrée for a kind of literary analysis that moves beyond the manifest deficiencies of the book’s prose style.

As an interpretive strategy, his approach is shown to be stunningly fruitful—though I suspect that a reader as intelligent, attentive and sensitive as Hardy could fruitfully read the back of a cereal box. Hardy devotes a section of the book to each of the Book of Mormon’s three primary narrators, and in so doing he provides a roughly chronological and nearly comprehensive sustained reading of the text. It is a tour de force and I am tempted to call it virtuosic, though occasionally the breadth achievement is obscured by the thick texture of his very close reading.

But if Hardy has an ambitious exegetical aim—and that bell rings on every page—he also has an important social objective. He offers not only a new reading of the Book of Mormon, but a new way of reading the Book of Mormon—that is, he offers a new discourse that he hopes will charter a new kind of inquiry undertaken by readers of all tribes. As Hardy puts it, he seeks to demonstrate “a mode of literary analysis by which all readers, regardless of their prior religious commitments … can discuss the book in useful and accurate ways” (xvii). He seeks, in short, to establish a new interpretive community, blessedly free from the entrenched allegiances that distort other discussions of the Book of Mormon.

For Hardy’s bracketing of the historical question is neither caprice nor cowardice, as it often is in defensive treatments of the Book of Mormon, but rather a legitimate sequel to his hermeneutic approach. Hardy enters the text by way of the motivations, personalities, and perceptions of its narrators, and therein lies his justification for avoiding, at least temporarily, the historical questions and the epistemological commitments they entail. Whether one regards the Book of Mormon as 19th-century folk pulp or as the authentic translation of an ancient document, one can attend to the text’s self-presentation as the work of three narrators—Nephi, Mormon and Moroni or “Nephi”, “Mormon” and “Moroni”—and thus read the text narratologically. “After all,” Hardy reminds us, “narrative is a mode of communication employed by both historians and novelists” (xvi).

In Hardy’s discursive theory, then, the subjectivity of the narrators offers a kind of haven from historicity. Whereas archaeological or rhetorical readings of the Book of Mormon lead directly into a thicket of assumptions—none of them externally verifiable, and thus none available to non-believers—about the book’s historical context, Hardy sees the question of narrative subjectivity as a route around those thorny patches. “Imagining [Nephi, Mormon and Moroni] as having life experiences and independent minds does not necessarily mean that one accepts their historicity,” he argues (xvii). One can engage with the substance of the text on its own terms by accepting the book’s narrative device, whether one sees that device as a tool of fiction or of historiography.

I’m sympathetic to Hardy’s desire to defer the ultimate questions in order to create an epistemological space for encountering the Book of Mormon on its own terms. And he’s hit upon an innovative and absorbing method for doing so. But in the final analysis, I’m not persuaded that the category of narrative subjectivity can do the work he asks of it. The narrative mind can work as a neutral rendezvous for devout and skeptical readers only if one holds human subjectivity constant over time, assuming that narrators of all times and places share the same foundations of consciousness and perception.

It has been the work of nearly a century of continental philosophy to vex precisely this notion of the autonomous, self-contained, transhistorical subject—but one need not quote Nietzsche, Althusser and Bourdieu to recognize that two narrative minds separated by twenty-five centuries will bring to the text a different set of perspectives, concerns, sensibilities, motivations, personalities and perceptions. Thus even a narratological analysis implies some assumption of historicity—and indeed to the extent that “Nephi,” “Mormon” and “Moroni” speak to contemporary readers as legible, coherent personalities, and Hardy brilliantly demonstrates that they do, one must reluctantly (or triumphantly) recognize a modern context at some level. One need only compare the laconic narrative voice of the Hebrew bible with the over-determined narrative personalities at work in the Book of Mormon to sense the difference.

As an example of Hardy’s narrative subject problem, consider the comparison he suggests between the narrative development of Mormon and the development of the implied narrator Benengali in Don Quixote. Hardy introduces the comparison to highlight the depth of Mormon’s indirect characterization in the Book of Mormon, which is striking when placed against the relatively incoherent, undeveloped personality of Cervantes’s Benengali. Hardy concludes:

The Book of Mormon may not be as much fun to read as Don Quixote, but at least in this one respect, it is more thoroughly composed. However readers may conceptualize Mormon, part of the interest of the book is observing the way he interacts with and shapes his material.

Hardy is indisputably right in both judgments here, but he doesn’t pursue the implications of the comparison. If Don Quixote fails to exhibit for the modern reader a coherent and developed narrative subjectivity, this is most likely not an artistic failing of Cervantes but rather an artifact of the history of the narrative genre. When Benengali was conceived in the early modern dawn of print culture, the romance had not yet become the novel, the author had not yet entirely separated from the narrator, and indeed the human being had not yet become the modern subject comfortably at home in its fully-furnished mental interior. Thus to interpret a narrative voice as coherent, undeveloped, deliberate or whatever is necessarily to make certain assumptions about what it means to be a human subject — assumptions that are inescapably historical in nature.

This is not to say that Hardy’s exegetical project is illegitimate, but rather that his social project will probably fail. Narrative subjectivity will probably not be the analytical charter for a tolerant new interpretive community around the Book of Mormon. But Hardy’s work remains a landmark achievement, one that I salute and from which I have personally learned much. For my part, I continue to find Hardy’s Reader’s Edition of the Book of Mormon to be his most significant work, which is to take nothing away from the intelligence of his readings in Understanding the Book of Mormon. But the lucidity and openness of the page in the Reader’s Edition has opened the text to me in little short of a revelation. Thank you, Brother Hardy.

Originally appeared under a different title and in a somewhat shorter form at Patheos.com.

Changes in the Book of Mormon

© 2009 by Royal Skousen

1. What is the critical text project of the Book of Mormon?

From the beginning, the two goals of the critical text project have been (1) to recover the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon, and (2) to determine the history of the text (namely, how it has changed over time). There are two basic kinds of changes in the history of the text: (a) accidental errors in the transmission of the text, and (b) the editing out of nonstandard English. I began the critical text project in 1988 and have been working full time on it since then.

2. What has been published thus far?

In 2001 the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), now a part of Brigham Young University (BYU) and a division of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, published the first two volumes of the critical text, namely:

(a)                The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text

564 pages (including 41 pages of introduction and 16 pages of black-and-white ultraviolet and color photographs of fragments)

(b)               The Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Entire Text in Two Parts

1000 pages (bound in two parts, including 36 pages of introduction and 8 pages of color photographs of the manuscript)

These two volumes present an exact reproduction in typescript of the extant portions of the two manuscripts (about 28 percent of the original manuscript and all but three lines of the printer’s manuscript).

A year later FARMS/BYU published a history of the project, the result of a symposium held at BYU:

(c)                Uncovering the Original Text of the Book of Mormon: History and Findings of the Critical Text Project (edited by M. Gerald Bradford and Alison V.P. Coutts).

This 76-page document includes articles by me on the history of this project and the systematic nature of the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon. It also includes articles by Robert Espinosa on the Wilford Wood fragments of the original manuscript, Ron Romig on the printer’s manuscript, and Larry Draper on the printed editions of the Book of Mormon.

From 2004 through 2009 FARMS published Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, volume 4 of the critical text, in six parts (each one appearing at the end of the summer):

(d)               Part One: Title Page, Witness Statements, 1 Nephi 1  2 Nephi 10

[published in August 2004; 658 pages, covering 14 percent of the text]

(e)        Part Two: 2 Nephi 11- Mosiah 16

[published in August 2005; 716 pages, covering 18 percent of the text]

(f)         Part Three: Mosiah 17- Alma 20

[published in August 2006; 686 pages, covering 16 percent of the text]

(g)        Part Four: Alma 21- 55

[published in September 2007; 700 pages, covering 17 percent of the text]

(h)        Part Five: Alma 56 – 3 Nephi 18

[published in August 2008; 730 pages, covering 19 percent of the text]

(i)         Part Six: 3 Nephi 19 – Moroni 10; Addenda

[published in August 2009; 638 pages, covering 16 percent of the text]

The addenda at the end of part 6 contains additional items of analysis, including a few reversals of previous textual decisions.

All of the above items (a through i) are available for purchase from the BYU Bookstore (FARMS now distributes their books through the BYU Bookstore). These books can also be ordered through other bookstores and website distributors.

In addition to these works, in August 2009 Yale University Press published The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text. The following is the promotional information that Yale released for the book:

First published in 1830, the Book of Mormon is the authoritative scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Over the past twenty-one years, Royal Skousen has pored over Joseph Smith’s original manuscripts and identified more than 2,000 textual errors in the 1830 edition. Although most of these discrepancies stem from inadvertent errors in copying and typesetting the text, the Yale edition contains about 600 corrections that have never appeared in any standard edition of the Book of Mormon, and about 250 of them affect the text’s meaning. Citing the earliest sources available, Skousen corrects the text in a work of remarkable dedication that will be a landmark in American religious scholarship.

Completely redesigned and typeset by nationally award-winning typographer Jonathan Saltzman, this new edition has been reformatted in sense-lines, making the text much more logical and pleasurable to read. Featuring a lucid introduction by historian Grant Hardy, the Yale edition serves not only as the most accurate version of the Book of Mormon ever published but also as an illuminating entryway into a vital religious tradition.

Grant Hardy, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, provides the following summary in his introduction to the Yale edition:

Royal Skousen has single-handedly brought the textual analysis of the Book of Mormon to a professional level on part with the finest classical and biblical scholarship. This volume is the culmination of his labors, and it is the most textually significant edition since Joseph Smith’s work was first published in 1830. It takes us back to the original manuscript (as best we can reconstruct it) and sometimes beyond, to the very words as they were first dictated by Joseph Smith.

Also included in the Yale edition is my own preface and an appendix listing over 700 significant changes in the history of the text.

The Yale edition presents the reconstructed original text in a clear-text format, without explanatory intervention. Unlike modern editions of the Book of Mormon that have added chapter summaries, scriptural cross-references, dates, and footnotes, this edition consists solely of the words dictated by Joseph Smith in 1828-29, as far as they can be established through standard methods of textual criticism. Later emendations by scribes, editors, and even Joseph Smith himself have been omitted, except for those that appear to restore original readings.

Anyone opening this volume will immediately be struck by the sense-lines format of the Book of Mormon text – that is, the way the lines of the text are broken up according to phrases and clauses. Joseph Smith dictated the book to scribes who wrote down his words. His dictation did not indicate punctuation, sentence structure, or paragraphing. These he left, ultimately, to the discretion of the printer. Consequently, the Yale edition constitutes a scholarly effort to present to the reader a dictated rather than a written text. To that end, I have decided to adopt the sense-line format. I make no claim that the sense-lines adopted in The Earliest Text represent Joseph’s actual dictation breaks, but the first verbalization of the text would have sounded something like the result of reading the sense-lines out loud.

The text of the Yale edition is a consolidation of the decisions made in the six parts of volume 4 of the critical text project, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon. Over the course of the six parts, including the addenda at the end of part 6, I have analyzed 5,280 cases of variation (or potential variation). The resulting text published by Yale University Press can be briefly characterized as follows:

2,241 differences between The Earliest Text and the standard printed edition

Cases of grammatical variation are discussed only once; volume 3 of the critical text (see below) will provide a complete discussion of grammatical changes.

606 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

216 are found only in the original manuscript, O

187 are found in only the printer’s manuscript, P (in these cases O is not extant)

88 are found in both O and P

2 are found in copies of the title page

113 are conjectural emendations

256 readings that either make a difference in meaning or change the spelling of a name

As might be suspected, none of these differences make a fundamental change in the message or doctrine of the book, but they make a difference when translating the Book of Mormon

131 readings that make the Book of Mormon text more consistent in phraseology or usage

34 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here is a brief numerical summary of the results for part 1 of volume 4 (from the title page through 2 Nephi 10):

773 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

419 differences between the critical text and the standard text

156 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

95 in O only; 6 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 38 in both O and P;

2 in the 1829 copyright certificates; 15 conjectured readings

75 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

51 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

14 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the changes that are recommended in part 1 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

1 Nephi 7:5            Ishmael and also his household
Ishmael and also his whole household

1 Nephi 7:17          my faith which is in thee
my faith which is in me

1 Nephi 8:27          towards those which had came at
towards those which had came up

1 Nephi 8:31          multitudes feeling their way
multitudes pressing their way

1 Nephi 10:10        take away the sins of the world
take away the sin of the world

1 Nephi 10:19        in these times
in this time

1 Nephi 11:36        the pride of the world and it fell
the pride of the world

1 Nephi 12:18        the word of the justice of the eternal God
the sword of the justice of the eternal God

1 Nephi 13:24        the gospel of the Lord
the gospel of the Lamb

1 Nephi 13:32        state of awful blindness
state of awful wickedness

1 Nephi 14:13        did gather together multitudes
did gather together in multitudes

1 Nephi 14:28        the things which I saw and heard
the things which I saw

1 Nephi 15:16        they shall be remembered again
they shall be numbered again

1 Nephi 15:35        the devil is the preparator of it
the devil is the proprietor of it

1 Nephi 15:36        the wicked are rejected from the righteous
the wicked are separated from the righteous

1 Nephi 17:3          he did provide means for us
he did provide ways and means for us

1 Nephi 17:41        he sent fiery flying serpents
he sent flying fiery serpents

1 Nephi 17:53        I will shock them
I will shake them

1 Nephi 19:2          the genealogy of his fathers
the genealogy of his forefathers

1 Nephi 19:4          what they should do
that they should do

1 Nephi 19:10        according to the words of Zenock
according to the words of Zenoch

1 Nephi 20:1          or out of the waters of baptism
<omitted>

1 Nephi 22:8          unto the being nourished by the Gentiles
unto the being nursed by the Gentiles

1 Nephi 22:12        the lands of their inheritance
the lands of their first inheritance

2 Nephi 1:5            the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me
the Lord hath consecrated this land unto me

2 Nephi 2:11          neither holiness nor misery
neither happiness nor misery

2 Nephi 3:18          I will raise up unto the fruit of thy loins
I will raise up one unto the fruit of thy loins

2 Nephi 3:20          their cry shall go
their cry shall go forth

2 Nephi 4:5            in the way that ye should go
in the right way that ye should go

2 Nephi 4:26          the Lord … hath visited men
the Lord … hath visited me

2 Nephi 9:13          deliver up the body of the righteous
deliver up the bodies of the righteous

We get the following results for part 2 of volume 4 (from 2 Nephi 11 through Mosiah 16); note that for most of this part of the text, the original manuscript is not extant, which has lessened the number of proposed changes:

897 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

387 differences between the critical text and the standard text

66 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

2 in O only; 34 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 5 in both O and P;

25 conjectured readings

23 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

13 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

5 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the changes discussed in part 2 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

2 Nephi 20:2          to turn away the needy
to turn aside the needy

2 Nephi 20:10        my hand hath founded the kingdom of the idols
my hand hath found the kingdom of the idols

2 Nephi 20:13        and I have moved the borders of the people
and I have removed the borders of the people

2 Nephi 20:29        Ramath is afraid
Ramah is afraid

2 Nephi 24:19        the remnant of those that are slain
the raiment of those that are slain

2 Nephi 24:25        I will bring the Assyrian in my land
I will break the Assyrian in my land

2 Nephi 26:9          the Son of righteousness shall appear
the Sun of righteousness shall appear

2 Nephi 28:23        and death and hell and the devil

and the devil

2 Nephi 30:6          they shall be a pure and a delightsome people
they shall be a white and a delightsome people

2 Nephi 30:18        I make an end of my sayings
I must make an end of my sayings

Jacob 5:8                I take away many of these … branches
I will take away many of these … branches

Jacob 5:13              in the nethermost part of my vineyard
in the nethermost parts of my vineyard

Jacob 5:19              to the nethermost part of the vineyard
to the nethermost parts of the vineyard

Jacob 5:20              the master
the master of the vineyard

Jacob 5:45              a part thereof brought forth wild fruit
the other part thereof brought forth wild fruit

Jacob 5:46              these I had hoped to preserve
these I had hope to preserve

Jacob 5:74              the Lord had preserved unto himself
the good the Lord had preserved unto himself

Jacob 5:75              [ye] have brought unto me again the natural fruit
it hath brought unto me again the natural fruit

Jacob 6:13              I shall meet you before the pleasing bar of God
I shall meet you before the pleading bar of God

Enos 1:3                 and the words which …
and I remembered the words which …

Enos 1:20               with a short skin girdle about their loins
with a short skin girded about their loins

Enos 1:24               between the Nephites and Lamanites
between the Nephites and the Lamanites

W of M 1:5            I chose these things to finish my record
I choose these things to finish my record

Mosiah 3:19          unless he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit
but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit

Mosiah 4:30          and observe the commandments of God
and observe to keep the commandments of God

Mosiah 7:20          that he has brought us into bondage
that has brought us into bondage

Mosiah 8:17          things which are past
things which have passed

Mosiah 9:14          to take off their flocks
to take of their flocks

Mosiah 10:5          and work and work all manner of fine linen
and work all manner of fine linen

Mosiah 15:24        and these are those who have part …
and there are those who have part …

For part 3 of volume 4 (from Mosiah 17 through Alma 20), the results are quite similar to part 2, especially since so little of the original manuscript is extant for this part of the text:

898 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

360 differences between the critical text and the standard text

82 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

0 in O only; 58 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 3 in both O and P;

21 conjectured readings

28 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

5 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 3 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

Mosiah 17:10        yea and I will suffer even until death
yea and I will suffer even unto death

Mosiah 17:13        and scourged his skin with fagots
and scorched his skin with fagots

Mosiah 19:24        after they had ended the ceremony
after they had ended the sermon

Mosiah 21:28        king Mosiah had a gift from God
king Benjamin had a gift from God

Mosiah 25:2          which was a descendant of Mulek
which was a descendant of Muloch

Mosiah 25:6          [omit]

and his brethren and all their afflictions
and he also read the account of Ammon

Mosiah 26:9          Alma did not know concerning them
Alma did know concerning them

but there were many witnesses against them
for there were many witnesses against them

Mosiah 26:23        it is I that granteth … unto the end a place
it is I that granteth … in the end a place

Mosiah 27:30        but now that they may foresee that …
but now I know that they may foresee that …

Mosiah 28:4          suffering much and fearing
and suffering much fearing

Mosiah 29:42        Alma was appointed to be the first chief judge
Alma was appointed to be the chief judge

Alma 1:24               they were remembered no more among the people
they were numbered no more among the people

Alma 2:30               to save and preserve this people
to save and protect this people

Alma 3:5                 save it were skin which was girded about their loins
save it were a skin which was girded about their loins

Alma 5:1                 Alma began to deliver the word of God
Alma began to declare the word of God

Alma 5:35               and ye shall not be hewn down
and ye shall not be cut down

Alma 10:2               I am the son of Giddonah
I am the son of Gidanah

Alma 10:5               his mysteries and his marvelous powers
his mysteries and his miraculous powers

Alma 11:2               or be stripped or be cast out
or be striped or be cast out

Alma 11:6               an ezrom of silver
an ezrum of silver

Alma 11:16             a shiblum is a half of a shiblon
a shilum is a half of a shiblon

Alma 11:21             and this Zeezrom began to question Amulek
and thus Zeezrom began to question Amulek

Alma 11:44             and shall be brought … before the bar of Christ
and all shall be brought … before the bar of Christ

Alma 12:14             for our words will condemn us
for our works will condemn us

Alma 17:1               he met with the sons of Mosiah
he met the sons of Mosiah

Alma 17:26             which was called the water of Sebus
which was called the waters of Sebus

Alma 17:31             we will preserve the flocks unto the king
we will restore the flocks unto the king

Alma 18:25             and he answered and said unto him
and he answered unto him

Alma 19:30             she clasped her hands
she clapped her hands

The results for part 4 of volume 4 are like those of part 1 since the original manuscript is basically extant for Alma 21-55:

995 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

422 differences between the critical text and the standard text

150 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

93 in O only; 12 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 28 in both O and P;

17 conjectured readings

56 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

16 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

4 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 4 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

Alma 24:5               they came forth to the land of Midian
they came forth to the land of Middoni

Alma 24:20             for the purpose of destroying the king
for the purpose of dethroning the king

Alma 27:27             they were among the people of Nephi
they were numbered among the people of Nephi

Alma 29:11             and by this did establish his church
and by them did establish his church

Alma 31:35             and many of them are our brethren
and many of them are our near brethren

Alma 32:2               success among the poor class of people
success among the poorer class of the people

Alma 33:21             that ye might be healed
that ye might behold

Alma 39:13             and that wrong which ye have done
and repair that wrong which ye have done

Alma 41:5               the one raised to happiness
the one restored to happiness

Alma 42:2               yea he drew out the man
yea he drove out the man

Alma 42:16             except there were a punishment (which also was
except there were a punishment (which also was

as eternal as the life of the soul should be affixed affixed
as eternal as the life of the soul) should be, affixed

Alma 43:6               they were all Amlicites and Zoramites
they were all of the Amlicites and the Zoramites

Alma 43:14             now those descendants were as numerous
now those dissenters were as numerous

Alma 43:38             by their swords and the loss of blood
by their wounds and the loss of blood

Alma 43:45             for their rites of worship and their church
for their rights of worship and their church

Alma 44:8               we will not suffer ourselves to take an oath unto you
we will suffer ourselves to make an oath unto you

Alma 44:13             saying unto them with a loud voice,  saying   …
crying unto them with a loud voice, saying …

Alma 46:34             he had power according to his will
he had power to do according to his will

Alma 47:13             if he would make him Amalickiah a second leader
if he would make him Amalickiah the second leader

Alma 48:8               banks of earth round about to enclose his armies
banks of earth round about to encircle his armies

Alma 48:21             in the latter end of the nineteenth year yea
in the latter end of the nineteenth year

Alma 49:5               in preparing their places of security
in repairing their places of security

Alma 49:28             because of his matchless power
because of his miraculous power

Alma 51:7               and also many of the people of liberty
and also among the people of liberty

Alma 51:15             desiring that he should read it
desiring that he should heed it

Alma 51:26             many cities : the city of Nephihah
many cities : the city of Moroni

Alma 53:6               in the land of Nephi
in the land of the Nephites

Alma 54:13             we have only sought to defend ourselves
we have only sought to defend our lives

Alma 54:24             and behold now I am a bold Lamanite
and behold I am now a bold Lamanite

The results for part 5 of volume 4 are in many respects quite different from other parts of the text since both P and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of O for much of the text for this part; O is also extant for parts of the text, which helps in reconstructing the original text:

906 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

349 differences between the critical text and the standard text

100 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

25 in O only; 50 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 13 in both O and P;

12 conjectured readings

27 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

2 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 5 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)       Revised reading

Alma 56:10             because of the numerority of their forces
because of the enormity of their forces

Alma 56:19             but thus were we preserved
but thus were we favored

Alma 56:37             and as we suppose it was their intent
and as we supposed that it was their intent

Alma 56:48             we do not doubt our mothers knew it
we do not doubt; our mothers knew

Alma 57:32             they did rise up in rebellion
they did raise up in rebellion

Alma 58:2               they were so much more numerous
they were so exceeding more numerous

Alma 58:4               to the governor of our land
to the great governor of our land

Alma 58:33             behold we trust in our God who …
behold we trust that it is our God who …

Alma 59:8               they came even and joined the army
they came over and joined the army

Alma 59:9               than to retake it from them
<omit>

Helaman 1:9           they sent forth one Kishkumen
they sent forth one Kishcumen

Helaman 1:29         and thus he did and he did head them
and thus he did head them

Helaman 2:4           for there was one Gadianton
for there was one Gaddianton

Helaman 3:3           in the forty and sixth yea there were …
in the forty and sixth year there were …

Helaman 4:12         and deserting away
and dissenting away

Helaman 4:25         exceedingly more numerous
more exceeding numerous

Helaman 6:20         every means in their power
every means whatsoever was in their power

Helaman 6:21         the more part of the Nephites
the more parts of the Nephites

Helaman 7:10         the garden gate which led by the highway
the garden gate which was by the highway

Helaman 7:16         how could ye have given way
how could ye have given away

Helaman 8:11         the waters … parted hither and thither
the waters … departed hither and thither

Helaman 8:19         even since the days of Abraham
ever since the days of Abraham

Helaman 8:20         and also Ezias and also Isaiah
and also Ezaias and also Isaiah

Helaman 9:36         that I Nephi know nothing concerning …
that I Nephi knew nothing concerning …

Helaman 12:15       for surely it is the earth that moveth
for sure it is the earth that moveth

Helaman 12:22       and woe unto him to whom he shall say this
and woe unto whom he shall say this

Helaman 14:5         there shall a new star arise
there shall be a new star arise

Helaman 16:3         when they saw that they could not …
when they saw this, that they could not …

Helaman 16:11       and these were the conditions
and thus were the conditions

3 Nephi 2:18          they did come forth
they did come forth again

3 Nephi 4:28          they did fell the tree to the earth
they did fall the tree to the earth

3 Nephi 5:9            a shorter but true account
a more short but a true account

3 Nephi 7:3            and thus they became tribes
and thus there became tribes

3 Nephi 9:9            the people of the king of Jacob
the people of the king Jacob

3 Nephi 9:21          I have come unto the world
I have come into the world

3 Nephi 10:4  <omit>
O ye people of the house of Israel

3 Nephi 11:0          Jesus Christ did show himself
Jesus Christ sheweth himself

3 Nephi 11:8          and behold they saw a Man
and behold they saw a man

3 Nephi 14:4          let me pull the mote out of thine eye
let me pull out the mote out of thine eye

3 Nephi 16:6          the Holy Ghost which witnesses unto them
the Holy Ghost which witness unto them

3 Nephi 16:15        but if they will not turn unto me
but if they will not return unto me

3 Nephi 16:17        and then the words … shall be fulfilled
and when the words … shall be fulfilled

3 Nephi 17:5          and beheld they were in tears
and behold they were in tears

3 Nephi 18:13        the gates of hell is ready, open to receive them
the gates of hell is already open to receive them

3 Nephi 18:16        I have set an example for you
I have set an example before you

3 Nephi 18:34        which hath been among you
which hath been among you beforetimes

Finally, in August 2009 the last part of volume 4 was published, with the following statistical summary of the analysis:

811 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

304 differences between the critical text and the standard text

52 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

1 in O only; 27 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 1 in both O and P;

23 conjectured readings

47 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

4 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

These results are much like those for parts 2 and 3 since O is generally not extant for the last part of the Book of Mormon text. Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 6 of volume 4:

Current  reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

3 Nephi 21:9          and there shall be among them those
and there shall be many among them

3 Nephi 21:16        and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy land
and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy hand

3 Nephi 22:4          and shalt not remember the reproach of thy youth
<omit>

3 Nephi 22:17        every tongue that shall revile against thee
every tongue that shall rise against thee

3 Nephi 25:2          the Son of righteousness arise
the Sun of righteousness arise

3 Nephi 28:3          blessed are ye because ye desired this thing
blessed are ye because ye desire this thing

3 Nephi 28:36        I knew not whether they were cleansed
I knew not whether they were changed

4 Nephi 1:27          there were many churches which professed to know the Christ
there were churches which professed to know the Christ
Mormon 2:4           we did come to the city of Angola
we did come to the city of Angolah

Mormon 4:14         many prisoners both women and children

many prisoners of women and of children

Mormon 6:14         and Jeneum had fallen with his ten thousand
and Joneum had fallen with his ten thousand

Mormon 6:15         and a few which had deserted over unto the Lamanites
and a few which had dissented over unto the Lamanites

Mormon 8:9           save it be the Lamanites and robbers
save it be Lamanites and robbers

Mormon 8:10         and whether they be upon the face of the land no man knoweth
and whither they be upon the face of the land no man knoweth

Mormon 8:28         leaders of churches and teachers shall rise
leaders of churches and teachers shall be lifted up

Ether 1:34               Jared his brother said unto him
therefore Jared his brother said unto him

Ether 1:41               and gather together … thy families
and gather together … thy family

Ether 1:43               and thus I will do unto thee
and this I will do unto thee

Ether 2:11               until the fullness come
until the fullness be come

Ether 2:13               and they dwelt in tents and dwelt in tents
and they dwelt in tents

Ether 2:14             at the end of four years
at the end of the four years

Ether 2:25               for ye cannot cross this great deep
for how be it / ye cannot cross this great deep

Ether 3:1                 he did carry them in his hands upon the top
he did carry them in his hands up on the top

Ether 3:18               and all this that this man knew that …
and all this because that this man knew that …

Ether 4:1                 and for this cause did king Mosiah keep them
and for this cause did king Benjamin keep them

Ether 6:5                 there should be a furious wind blow
there should a furious wind blow

Ether 8:24               or woe be unto it
for woe be unto it

Ether 9:2                 which did not seek his destruction
which were not or which did not seek his destruction

Ether 9:22               yea and he even saw the Son of righteousness
yea and he even saw the Sun of righteousness

Ether 11:4               and Shiblom reigned in his stead
and Shiblon reigned in his stead

Ether 12:2               for he could not be restrained
for he could not be constrained

Ether 12:4               which hope cometh of faith maketh an anchor
which hope cometh of faith and maketh an anchor

Ether 13:31             and there was none to restrain them
and there was none to constrain them

Ether 14:2 and of his wives and children
and they of his wife and children

Ether 14:12             he fled to the borders upon the seashore
he fled to the borders by the seashore

Ether 14:17             and he did slay both women and children
and he did slay both men women and children

Ether 14:28             the valley of Shurr was near the hill Comnor
the valley of Shurr was near the hill Comron

Moroni 7:16           and to persuade to believe in Christ
and persuadeth to believe in Christ

Moroni 7:26           and by faith they become the sons of God
and by faith they became the sons of God

Moroni 9:24           many of our brethren have deserted over
many of our brethren have dissented over

Moroni 9:24           and many more will also desert over unto them
and many more will also dissent over unto them

Moroni 10:34         before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah
before the pleading bar of the great Jehovah

3. What other volumes will be published as part of this project?

(a) Volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon

In this third volume, I will discuss each step in the transmission of the text, including Joseph Smith’s dictating of the text and his scribes’ writing it down (the original manuscript), their copying of the text into the printer’s manuscript, the typesetting of the first (1830) edition, and the publishing of 19 significant editions since then (the 1837 and 1840 under Joseph Smith’s direction, plus 12 more within the LDS textual tradition, and 5 within the RLDS textual tradition). This volume will examine some of the important issues regarding how Joseph Smith translated and what kind of text was revealed to him. Each edition will also be examined in terms of its editing history. Each type of grammatical editing will be thoroughly described in this volume. There will also be a lined-up comparison between the biblical quotations from the King James Bible and the corresponding Book of Mormon passages.

In 2002 I decided that I could not produce volume 3 without first determining what the original text was. For that reason, volume 4 has been published first – and also in parts, so that the reading public will have time to examine the textual analysis in manageable segments.

(b) Volume 5, A Complete Electronic Collation of the Book of Mormon

This last volume will be available in an electronic format. A few printed copies of the collation will be prepared for archival purposes. In this volume, the entire text for both manuscripts and the 20 editions is lined up and compared, with every difference specified – not only word and phrase differences, but also punctuation, capitalization, spelling, paragraphing, versification, and so forth. The differences will be categorized and can be searched in terms of the type of change. I am planning to make this electronic collation available at the same time volume 3 is published.

4. What are some of the major findings of this project?

(a) The original manuscript supports the hypothesis that the text was given to Joseph Smith word for word and that he could see the spelling of the names (in support of what witnesses of the translation process claimed about Joseph’s translation – namely, that he spelled out the Book of Mormon names, at least when the name first appeared).

(b) The original text is much more consistent and systematic in expression than has ever been realized.

(c) There are a number of errors in the text that have never been corrected in any LDS or RLDS edition, although none of them fundamentally alter the text.

(d) There are occasional errors in the original manuscript itself (see, for instance, the reading “Ishmael and also his hole hole” in 1 Nephi 7:5); errors could enter the text from its very earliest transmission; many of the errors in the original manuscript show that this manuscript was written down from oral dictation.

(e) Errors in the printer’s manuscript clearly show that this manuscript was produced by visual copying from another text, not by oral dictation.

(f) Joseph Smith’s editing for the second and third editions (1837 and 1840) represents human editing, not a revealed revision of the text.

(g) The original text includes unique kinds of expression that appear to be uncharacteristic of English in any time and place; some of these expressions are Hebraistic in nature.

(h) The early transmission of the Book of Mormon text does not in general support the traditional assumptions of textual criticism – namely, the assumptions that the transmitted text tends to remove difficult readings and lengthen the text; instead, the early transmission of the Book of Mormon text tends to introduce more difficult readings and to omit words and phrases.

(i) The vocabulary of the Book of Mormon text appears to derive from the 1500s and the 1600s, not from the 1800s.

This last finding is quite remarkable. Lexical evidence suggests that the original text contained a number of expressions and words with meanings that were lost from the English language by 1700, including the following (with the date of their last citation in the Oxford English Dictionary given in parentheses):

to require ‘to request’ (1665)

Enos 1:18 reads “thy fathers have also required of me this thing”

[Ezra 8:22: “for I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way”]

sermon ‘talk, discourse, speech’ (1594) [conjectural emendation]

Mosiah 19:24 should read “after they had ended the sermon”

(not the current reading “after they had ended the ceremony”)

to cast arrows ‘to shoot arrows’ (1609)

Alma 49:4 reads “the Lamanites could not cast their stones and their arrows at them”

[Proverbs 26:18: “as a mad man who casteth firebrands arrows and death”]

to counsel ‘to counsel with’ (1547)

Alma 37:37 originally read “counsel the Lord in all thy doings”

[similarly in Alma 39:10]

but if ‘unless’ (1596)

Mosiah 3:19 originally read “for the natural man is an enemy to God …

and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit”

to depart ‘to part’ (1677)

Helaman 8:11 originally read “to smite upon the waters of the Red Sea

and they departed hither and thither”

extinct: in reference to an individual’s death (1675)

Alma 44:7 reads “and inflect the wounds of death in your bodies

that ye may become extinct” [similarly in several other places]

the pleading bar of God (not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but three early 1600 citations have been found, including one in a legal context) [conjectural emendation]

Jacob 6:13 should read “until I shall meet you before the pleading bar of God”, not “the pleasing bar of God” [similarly in Moroni 10:34]

As noted, only two of these instances of archaic vocabulary (dating from Early Modern English) are found in the 1611 King James Bible.

5. What have been the most significant events in the history of this project?

Besides the actual publishing of the volumes of the critical text themselves, there are two events that stand out:

(a) April 1991: two weeks spent in Independence, Missouri, making a careful examination of my transcript of the printer’s manuscript against the actual manuscript, with the assistance of my wife, Sirkku, and Ron Romig, archivist for the Community of Christ (then the RLDS Church).

(b) October 1991: three weeks working with Robert Espinosa and his fellow conservators at the BYU library on fragments of the original manuscript owned by the Wilford Wood family of Bountiful, Utah; these fragments were photographed in ultraviolet light by David Hawkinson and constitute about two percent of the original manuscript.

6. What has been your relationship with the LDS and RLDS Churches in this project?

This project began as an independent scholarly project, and I have made sure by legal agreements that this independence has been preserved. Since the beginning of this project (in 1988) the LDS Historical Department has provided full access to ultraviolet photographs of the original manuscript and has allowed me to directly examine the original manuscript as well as their enormous library of Book of Mormon editions. Without their cooperation, this project would never have been possible. Similarly, archivist Ron Romig, church historian Richard Howard (now retired), and the leadership of the Community of Christ (formerly the RLDS Church) have also been fully cooperative in providing access to the printer’s manuscript as well as an enlarged photocopy of that manuscript, plus their large collection of Book of Mormon editions.

In 1994 the LDS Church Scriptures Committee requested that I provide information about my findings on the text. For the next four to five years, this information was conveyed to the Scriptures Committee. Prior to submitting this information, however, the Church, BYU, and I signed a legally binding letter of understanding guaranteeing the independence of the critical text project, with these two important provisos: (1) I would hold the copyright to the critical text, and (2) I would exercise complete control over the content of the critical text, including my interpretations and analyses of the text.

The critical text project is a scholarly one and has not received any ecclesiastical approval or endorsement. The transcripts and the textual interpretations represent my own scholarly work, with peer review from a number of scholars (especially David Calabro, a graduate student in Hebrew studies at the University of Chicago). I have received no explicit response regarding any of my interpretations or suggestions for changes from the Church Scriptures Committee. The Church committee has had full access to my findings and is free to use them (or not use them) as they wish.

I have also retained the right to legally extend this freedom to use the results of the critical text project to anyone wishing to create their own single reading of the Book of Mormon text, including the Community of Christ and other churches as well as publishing firms interested in producing a noncritical edition of the Book of Mormon.

7. Will any of these changes appear in subsequent LDS editions of the Book of Mormon?

I do not know the answer to this question. The Church will decide for itself what changes, if any, will be implemented. The Church has never engaged in a public discussion of such changes or the arguments for making (or not making) those changes. On the other hand, this scholarly critical text project promotes public discussion and, when done properly, establishes an on-going process and allows others to contribute. For instance, as part of this project, I have requested anyone who has any suggestions for emendations to the text or questions about problematic readings to send them to me. Thus far I have received over a hundred suggestions for change – and about thirty percent of these have led to emendations in the text. Surprisingly, most of these emendations have come not from scholars but from regular members of the Church – readers of the Book of Mormon who are simply striving to understand the text. Such an open request for participation has significantly improved the findings of this project.

One important fact that I realized early on in this project is that the original text is not fully recoverable by scholarly means. Only 28 percent of the Book of Mormon text is extant in the original manuscript. Over half of the new readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition derive from readings in the original manuscript. Oliver Cowdery averaged about three textual changes per manuscript page as he copied from the original manuscript into the printer’s manuscript. The clear majority of these changes would be unrecoverable if those portions of the original manuscript were not extant. In most cases we have no clue that there is even an error in the current text unless the original manuscript tells us so. Given that the majority of the original manuscript is no longer extant, we will be unable to fully recover the original text by human means. And even the extant portions of the original manuscript probably have errors that we are unaware of. The only way that the original text could be fully restored would be if the Lord chose to reveal it again. Such is definitely not within the purview of this scholarly project.

One valuable aspect of this public, scholarly discussion of the text is that later changes in the text could be made by the Church without engendering the typical complaint that the Church is making changes for political reasons. Note, in particular, the uproar over the 1981 change in 2 Nephi 30:6 from “a white and a delightsome people” to “a pure and a delightsome people”. The change was first implemented in the 1840 edition; Joseph Smith’s motivation for making that change was based on quite something else, as I argue in part 2 of volume 4 under 2 Nephi 30:6. An independent public discussion in a scholarly context will avoid having the Church take abuse for making alterations to the text.

8. Does this project have an apologetic purpose? In other words, is one of its purposes to defend the Book of Mormon against detractors?

My task, as I have always seen it, is to recover the original English-language text to the extent scholarly and academic analysis will allow. I have therefore restricted my discussion to the text per se and have completely avoided discussions of whether there are practices found among the cultures of the world (including the Americas) in support of particular readings. Nor have I engaged in any discussion of external evidences for the Book of Mormon, including questions of geography, genetics, and archaeology.

My initial endeavor as editor of the critical text project was to produce a detailed transcription of the original and printer’s manuscripts. And right from the beginning, I discovered errors that had crept into the text as Oliver Cowdery and the other scribes produced the printer’s manuscript from the original manuscript. Within a year or so I recognized that I would not be able to completely recover the original text by scholarly methods. Yet at the same time, I began to see considerable evidence for the traditional interpretation that witnesses of the translation process claimed: (1) the text was given word for word, (2) Book of Mormon names were frequently spelled out the first time they occurred in the text, and (3) during dictation there was no rewriting of the text except to correct errors in taking down the dictation. Joseph Smith was literally reading off an already composed English-language text. The evidence in the manuscripts and in the language of the text itself supports the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon was a precisely determined text. I do not consider this conclusion apologetic, but instead as one demanded by the evidence.

The opposing viewpoint, that Joseph Smith got ideas and he translated them into his own English, cannot be supported by the manuscript and textual evidence. The only substantive argument for this alternative view has been the nonstandard nature of the text, with its implication that God would never speak ungrammatical English, so the nonstandard usage must be the result of Joseph Smith putting the ideas he received into his own language. Yet with the recent finding that the original vocabulary of the text appears to be dated from the 1500s and 1600s (not the 1800s), we now need to consider the possibility that the ungrammaticality of the original text may also date from that earlier period of time, not necessarily from Joseph’s own time and place. Joseph Smith is not the author of the Book of Mormon, nor is he actually the translator. Instead, he was the revelator: through him the Lord revealed the English-language text (by means of the interpreters, later called the Urim and Thummim, and the seer stone). Such a view is consistent, I believe, with Joseph’s use elsewhere of the verb translate to mean ‘transmit’ and the noun translation to mean ‘transmission’ (as in the eighth Article of Faith).

I should also point out that my personal testimony of the Book of Mormon is not dependent upon my work on this project. The Book of Mormon stands on its own and is ultimately not dependent on how that text may vary in printed editions or in the manuscripts. Moroni promised that the Lord will give a testimony of the book to the prayerful reader – irrespective of any infelicities and errors in the text (which Moroni recognized could be there, as he himself noted in the last sentence on the title page of the Book of Mormon). I received my own personal witness of this book long before I ever began work on this project. I have never needed to prove to myself that the text is from the Lord. Nor have errors in the text ever prevented the Spirit from bearing witness that the book is the Lord’s.

My own personal witness of this book dates from 1979, when I was reading the book during a time of difficulty. I was reading the words that king Lamoni’s queen expresses as she comes out of her state of unconsciousness:

Alma 19:29-30 (original text)

she arose and stood upon her feet and cried with a loud voice saying

O blessed Jesus who has saved me from an awful hell

O blessed God have mercy on this people

and when she had said this she clapped her hands being filled with joy

speaking many words which were not understood

As I was reading this passage, the Spirit witnessed to me, “This really happened.” What is interesting about this passage is that I didn’t actually read “she clapped her hands” (the reading based on the printer’s manuscript), but instead I read “she clasped her hands” (the reading found in the 1830 edition as well as in all LDS editions). Now I do not take this personal witness as evidence that I should reject the earliest reading, clapped. It simply means that the Lord witnesses the truthfulness of this book irrespective of the minor errors that may have crept in. I know of no error that changes any doctrine or the basic account of the text. There is no error, awkward expression, or ungrammaticality in any of the printed editions of the book that will prevent the honest reader from gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon.

9. So why should we be interested in recovering the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon?

The major thrust of this project is oriented towards scholars, not the lay readers of the book. There is no reason to restore in the current standard text the nonstandard language and the non-English Hebraisms that were largely eliminated by Joseph Smith himself in his editing of the text for the second (1837) edition. On the other hand, many of the word and phrase changes proposed by the critical text project (such as those listed under question 2 above) make the text much more systematic and consistent. The Church (especially in its 1920 and 1981 editions) has sought to print an accurate text, including the restoration of original readings (providing the language itself is standard English).

From a scholarly perspective, restoring the original text provides new ways of viewing the Book of Mormon text. By studying the language of the text, I have seen much that confirms my personal testimony of the book as well as what early witnesses of the translation were able to observe.

10. Won’t changing the text prove embarrassing for some commentaries and interpretations by church leaders and scholars?

I do not think this is much of a problem. There are so few examples where restoring an original reading will cause difficulties for previous commentary. In virtually every case, the original text will reinforce and make gospel principles even clearer. As an example, there is the passage in Alma 39:13 where Alma tells his son Corianton (in the current text) to “return unto them [the Zoramites] and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done”. Yet the original text read here “return unto them and acknowledge your faults and repair that wrong which ye have done”. The original text emphasizes that repentance involves more than saying “I’m sorry”: it requires us to do all we can to make restitution for our sins. This doctrine is, of course, supported by other passages in the Book of Mormon (see, for instance, Helaman 5:17).

One place where the original reading will lead to some revision of commentary deals with the parenthetical phrase that Joseph Smith added to the 1840 edition in 1 Nephi 20:1, which explains that the phrase “the waters of Judah” means ‘the waters of baptism’. The 1920 edition removed the parentheses that Joseph had placed around the extra phrase “or out of the waters of baptism”, which has subsequently led some church writers to interpret the additional phraseology as part of the original Isaiah text, with a few writers even accusing ancient Jewish scribes as having purposely removed a clear Old Testament reference to baptism from the book of Isaiah!

11. Would it be worth doing textual criticism for the translations of the English-language Book of Mormon into other languages?

Yes. In fact, I can think of one very specific aspect that could be of tremendous benefit to my own project – namely, the question of how translators have dealt with problematic passages. Their solutions may suggest possible conjectural emendations for the English-language text. As an example, consider the English-language reading for Mosiah 17:13: “they took him and bound him and scourged his skin with fagots yea even unto death”. This passage literally states that Abinadi was whipped to death with bundles of sticks. I have conjectured that the word scourged here is a mishearing for scorched, the verb used in the next verse (Mosiah 17:14) to refer to Abinadi’s death by fire (“and now when the flames began to scorch him”). And some foreign language translators have also realized that the text intends to say that Abinadi was burnt to death and have therefore substituted for scourged a verb that is equivalent to burning rather than whipping. Some students in my class on textual criticism have involved themselves in projects of this sort, but their work has been limited to a few languages and only to checking whether the English-language conjectures proposed in this project can be found in any of the translations. It would undoubtedly be worthwhile checking the other side of the coin: Are there readings in the translations that suggest conjectures for the English-language text?

12. What role has your theory of Analogical Modeling played in the Book of Mormon project?

Analogical Modeling (AM) is a theory of language that I have worked on since the 1970s. The traditional method for describing language has been in terms of rules, but in Analogical Modeling there are no rules, only examples (instances) of past behavior that a speaker uses to understand and produce language. AM is actually a general theory of description that uses both nearest neighbors and not-so-near neighbors (under certain well-defined conditions of homogeneity) to predict behavior.

AM has been implicitly used in many aspects of the critical text project, particularly in finding instances of usage for testing the reliability of readings. One important characteristic of the Book of Mormon – one that is very helpful in establishing the text – is the size of the book (584 pages of canonical text in the 1830 edition). The specific language of the text is sufficiently repeated throughout the book so that there are usually enough exemplars to make a reasoned analysis for any given expression or phrase. It has not, in my opinion, been fully appreciated how huge a scriptural text the Book of Mormon is and what an advantage that is in analyzing and establishing its text.

In distinction to the findings of computerized stylistic analyses of the Book of Mormon text, I have found that many expressions, phrases, and words extend throughout the text, such as the term pleading bar by both Jacob and Moroni (in Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34) or the precise expression “yea even the sword of the justice of the eternal God” by both Nephi and Moroni (in 1 Nephi 12:18 and Ether 8:23). Sometimes Jacob uses expressions that are unique to him (at least in the original text), such as “the commands of God”. As many readers have recognized, every time Jacob starts to speak or write, his flowing style is almost immediately distinguishable from his brother Nephi’s complex syntax – and it doesn’t take a statistical analysis of function words within passages of five thousand words to figure this out!

As a result of my work in AM, I have continually attempted to look for exemplars that might be responsible for creating errors in the Book of Mormon text. As an example, in 2 Nephi 20:29 all the printed editions as well as the printer’s manuscript read Ramath instead of the Ramah found in Isaiah 10:29 (the original manuscript is not extant for this passage). A number of scholars have noted that Ramath would have been the earlier Hebrew form for Ramah and have therefore claimed that the Book of Mormon text here maintains the earlier Hebrew name for this place, thus showing that the Book of Mormon text was translated from a more ancient version of the book of Isaiah. What has not been noticed in all of this discussion is that within the Book of Mormon quotation for Isaiah 2-14 (found in 2 Nephi 12-24), a number of names are misspelled in the printer’s manuscript. The 1830 typesetter corrected all of these misspellings by reference to his own King James Bible – except for the case of Ramath. And for each of these misspelled names there is an analogical source for the misspelling – either a nearby word in the Isaiah quotation or a common English word or biblical name:

In the case of Ramath, we find Hamath earlier in the same chapter (2 Nephi 20:9). Another influence that would have led Oliver Cowdery to write Ramath instead of the correct Ramah would have been the name Aiath, found in the immediately preceding verse (2 Nephi 20:28). In fact, these two earlier occurrences of names ending in -ath could have readily misled the 1830 typesetter into thinking that he didn’t need to check his King James Bible for the spelling Ramath.

Three AM books have been published and are all available, two authored by me and one edited by me and colleagues:

(a) Analogical Modeling of Language (Kluwer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989)

(b) Analogy and Structure (Kluwer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1992)

(c) Analogical Modeling: An Exemplar-Based Approach to Language, edited by Royal Skousen, Deryle Lonsdale, and Dilworth B. Parkinson (John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 2002)

These books are rather technical. For a general introduction to AM, see my article “Analogical Modeling: Exemplars, Rules, and Quantum Computing”, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Berkeley, California: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2003), pages 425-39. A preprint version of this paper is available from our research group’s AM website: <http://humanities.byu.edu/am/>.

Changes in the Book of Mormon

© 2009 by Royal Skousen

1. What is the critical text project of the Book of Mormon?

From the beginning, the two goals of the critical text project have been (1) to recover the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon, and (2) to determine the history of the text (namely, how it has changed over time). There are two basic kinds of changes in the history of the text: (a) accidental errors in the transmission of the text, and (b) the editing out of nonstandard English. I began the critical text project in 1988 and have been working full time on it since then.

2. What has been published thus far?

In 2001 the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies (FARMS), now a part of Brigham Young University (BYU) and a division of the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship, published the first two volumes of the critical text, namely:

(a)                The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Extant Text

564 pages (including 41 pages of introduction and 16 pages of black-and-white ultraviolet and color photographs of fragments)

(b)               The Printer’s Manuscript of the Book of Mormon: Typographical Facsimile of the Entire Text in Two Parts

1000 pages (bound in two parts, including 36 pages of introduction and 8 pages of color photographs of the manuscript)

These two volumes present an exact reproduction in typescript of the extant portions of the two manuscripts (about 28 percent of the original manuscript and all but three lines of the printer’s manuscript).

A year later FARMS/BYU published a history of the project, the result of a symposium held at BYU:

(c)                Uncovering the Original Text of the Book of Mormon: History and Findings of the Critical Text Project (edited by M. Gerald Bradford and Alison V.P. Coutts).

This 76-page document includes articles by me on the history of this project and the systematic nature of the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon. It also includes articles by Robert Espinosa on the Wilford Wood fragments of the original manuscript, Ron Romig on the printer’s manuscript, and Larry Draper on the printed editions of the Book of Mormon.

From 2004 through 2009 FARMS published Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, volume 4 of the critical text, in six parts (each one appearing at the end of the summer):

(d)               Part One: Title Page, Witness Statements, 1 Nephi 1  2 Nephi 10

[published in August 2004; 658 pages, covering 14 percent of the text]

(e)        Part Two: 2 Nephi 11- Mosiah 16

[published in August 2005; 716 pages, covering 18 percent of the text]

(f)         Part Three: Mosiah 17- Alma 20

[published in August 2006; 686 pages, covering 16 percent of the text]

(g)        Part Four: Alma 21- 55

[published in September 2007; 700 pages, covering 17 percent of the text]

(h)        Part Five: Alma 56 – 3 Nephi 18

[published in August 2008; 730 pages, covering 19 percent of the text]

(i)         Part Six: 3 Nephi 19 – Moroni 10; Addenda

[published in August 2009; 638 pages, covering 16 percent of the text]

The addenda at the end of part 6 contains additional items of analysis, including a few reversals of previous textual decisions.

All of the above items (a through i) are available for purchase from the BYU Bookstore (FARMS now distributes their books through the BYU Bookstore). These books can also be ordered through other bookstores and website distributors.

In addition to these works, in August 2009 Yale University Press published The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text. The following is the promotional information that Yale released for the book:

First published in 1830, the Book of Mormon is the authoritative scripture of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Over the past twenty-one years, Royal Skousen has pored over Joseph Smith’s original manuscripts and identified more than 2,000 textual errors in the 1830 edition. Although most of these discrepancies stem from inadvertent errors in copying and typesetting the text, the Yale edition contains about 600 corrections that have never appeared in any standard edition of the Book of Mormon, and about 250 of them affect the text’s meaning. Citing the earliest sources available, Skousen corrects the text in a work of remarkable dedication that will be a landmark in American religious scholarship.

Completely redesigned and typeset by nationally award-winning typographer Jonathan Saltzman, this new edition has been reformatted in sense-lines, making the text much more logical and pleasurable to read. Featuring a lucid introduction by historian Grant Hardy, the Yale edition serves not only as the most accurate version of the Book of Mormon ever published but also as an illuminating entryway into a vital religious tradition.

Grant Hardy, professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, provides the following summary in his introduction to the Yale edition:

Royal Skousen has single-handedly brought the textual analysis of the Book of Mormon to a professional level on part with the finest classical and biblical scholarship. This volume is the culmination of his labors, and it is the most textually significant edition since Joseph Smith’s work was first published in 1830. It takes us back to the original manuscript (as best we can reconstruct it) and sometimes beyond, to the very words as they were first dictated by Joseph Smith.

Also included in the Yale edition is my own preface and an appendix listing over 700 significant changes in the history of the text.

The Yale edition presents the reconstructed original text in a clear-text format, without explanatory intervention. Unlike modern editions of the Book of Mormon that have added chapter summaries, scriptural cross-references, dates, and footnotes, this edition consists solely of the words dictated by Joseph Smith in 1828-29, as far as they can be established through standard methods of textual criticism. Later emendations by scribes, editors, and even Joseph Smith himself have been omitted, except for those that appear to restore original readings.

Anyone opening this volume will immediately be struck by the sense-lines format of the Book of Mormon text – that is, the way the lines of the text are broken up according to phrases and clauses. Joseph Smith dictated the book to scribes who wrote down his words. His dictation did not indicate punctuation, sentence structure, or paragraphing. These he left, ultimately, to the discretion of the printer. Consequently, the Yale edition constitutes a scholarly effort to present to the reader a dictated rather than a written text. To that end, I have decided to adopt the sense-line format. I make no claim that the sense-lines adopted in The Earliest Text represent Joseph’s actual dictation breaks, but the first verbalization of the text would have sounded something like the result of reading the sense-lines out loud.

The text of the Yale edition is a consolidation of the decisions made in the six parts of volume 4 of the critical text project, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon. Over the course of the six parts, including the addenda at the end of part 6, I have analyzed 5,280 cases of variation (or potential variation). The resulting text published by Yale University Press can be briefly characterized as follows:

2,241 differences between The Earliest Text and the standard printed edition

Cases of grammatical variation are discussed only once; volume 3 of the critical text (see below) will provide a complete discussion of grammatical changes.

606 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

216 are found only in the original manuscript, O

187 are found in only the printer’s manuscript, P (in these cases O is not extant)

88 are found in both O and P

2 are found in copies of the title page

113 are conjectural emendations

256 readings that either make a difference in meaning or change the spelling of a name

As might be suspected, none of these differences make a fundamental change in the message or doctrine of the book, but they make a difference when translating the Book of Mormon

131 readings that make the Book of Mormon text more consistent in phraseology or usage

34 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here is a brief numerical summary of the results for part 1 of volume 4 (from the title page through 2 Nephi 10):

773 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

419 differences between the critical text and the standard text

156 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

95 in O only; 6 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 38 in both O and P;

2 in the 1829 copyright certificates; 15 conjectured readings

75 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

51 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

14 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the changes that are recommended in part 1 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

1 Nephi 7:5            Ishmael and also his household
Ishmael and also his whole household

1 Nephi 7:17          my faith which is in thee
my faith which is in me

1 Nephi 8:27          towards those which had came at
towards those which had came up

1 Nephi 8:31          multitudes feeling their way
multitudes pressing their way

1 Nephi 10:10        take away the sins of the world
take away the sin of the world

1 Nephi 10:19        in these times
in this time

1 Nephi 11:36        the pride of the world and it fell
the pride of the world

1 Nephi 12:18        the word of the justice of the eternal God
the sword of the justice of the eternal God

1 Nephi 13:24        the gospel of the Lord
the gospel of the Lamb

1 Nephi 13:32        state of awful blindness
state of awful wickedness

1 Nephi 14:13        did gather together multitudes
did gather together in multitudes

1 Nephi 14:28        the things which I saw and heard
the things which I saw

1 Nephi 15:16        they shall be remembered again
they shall be numbered again

1 Nephi 15:35        the devil is the preparator of it
the devil is the proprietor of it

1 Nephi 15:36        the wicked are rejected from the righteous
the wicked are separated from the righteous

1 Nephi 17:3          he did provide means for us
he did provide ways and means for us

1 Nephi 17:41        he sent fiery flying serpents
he sent flying fiery serpents

1 Nephi 17:53        I will shock them
I will shake them

1 Nephi 19:2          the genealogy of his fathers
the genealogy of his forefathers

1 Nephi 19:4          what they should do
that they should do

1 Nephi 19:10        according to the words of Zenock
according to the words of Zenoch

1 Nephi 20:1          or out of the waters of baptism
<omitted>

1 Nephi 22:8          unto the being nourished by the Gentiles
unto the being nursed by the Gentiles

1 Nephi 22:12        the lands of their inheritance
the lands of their first inheritance

2 Nephi 1:5            the Lord hath covenanted this land unto me
the Lord hath consecrated this land unto me

2 Nephi 2:11          neither holiness nor misery
neither happiness nor misery

2 Nephi 3:18          I will raise up unto the fruit of thy loins
I will raise up one unto the fruit of thy loins

2 Nephi 3:20          their cry shall go
their cry shall go forth

2 Nephi 4:5            in the way that ye should go
in the right way that ye should go

2 Nephi 4:26          the Lord … hath visited men
the Lord … hath visited me

2 Nephi 9:13          deliver up the body of the righteous
deliver up the bodies of the righteous

We get the following results for part 2 of volume 4 (from 2 Nephi 11 through Mosiah 16); note that for most of this part of the text, the original manuscript is not extant, which has lessened the number of proposed changes:

897 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

387 differences between the critical text and the standard text

66 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

2 in O only; 34 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 5 in both O and P;

25 conjectured readings

23 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

13 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

5 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the changes discussed in part 2 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

2 Nephi 20:2          to turn away the needy
to turn aside the needy

2 Nephi 20:10        my hand hath founded the kingdom of the idols
my hand hath found the kingdom of the idols

2 Nephi 20:13        and I have moved the borders of the people
and I have removed the borders of the people

2 Nephi 20:29        Ramath is afraid
Ramah is afraid

2 Nephi 24:19        the remnant of those that are slain
the raiment of those that are slain

2 Nephi 24:25        I will bring the Assyrian in my land
I will break the Assyrian in my land

2 Nephi 26:9          the Son of righteousness shall appear
the Sun of righteousness shall appear

2 Nephi 28:23        and death and hell and the devil

and the devil

2 Nephi 30:6          they shall be a pure and a delightsome people
they shall be a white and a delightsome people

2 Nephi 30:18        I make an end of my sayings
I must make an end of my sayings

Jacob 5:8                I take away many of these … branches
I will take away many of these … branches

Jacob 5:13              in the nethermost part of my vineyard
in the nethermost parts of my vineyard

Jacob 5:19              to the nethermost part of the vineyard
to the nethermost parts of the vineyard

Jacob 5:20              the master
the master of the vineyard

Jacob 5:45              a part thereof brought forth wild fruit
the other part thereof brought forth wild fruit

Jacob 5:46              these I had hoped to preserve
these I had hope to preserve

Jacob 5:74              the Lord had preserved unto himself
the good the Lord had preserved unto himself

Jacob 5:75              [ye] have brought unto me again the natural fruit
it hath brought unto me again the natural fruit

Jacob 6:13              I shall meet you before the pleasing bar of God
I shall meet you before the pleading bar of God

Enos 1:3                 and the words which …
and I remembered the words which …

Enos 1:20               with a short skin girdle about their loins
with a short skin girded about their loins

Enos 1:24               between the Nephites and Lamanites
between the Nephites and the Lamanites

W of M 1:5            I chose these things to finish my record
I choose these things to finish my record

Mosiah 3:19          unless he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit
but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit

Mosiah 4:30          and observe the commandments of God
and observe to keep the commandments of God

Mosiah 7:20          that he has brought us into bondage
that has brought us into bondage

Mosiah 8:17          things which are past
things which have passed

Mosiah 9:14          to take off their flocks
to take of their flocks

Mosiah 10:5          and work and work all manner of fine linen
and work all manner of fine linen

Mosiah 15:24        and these are those who have part …
and there are those who have part …

For part 3 of volume 4 (from Mosiah 17 through Alma 20), the results are quite similar to part 2, especially since so little of the original manuscript is extant for this part of the text:

898 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

360 differences between the critical text and the standard text

82 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

0 in O only; 58 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 3 in both O and P;

21 conjectured readings

28 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

5 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 3 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

Mosiah 17:10        yea and I will suffer even until death
yea and I will suffer even unto death

Mosiah 17:13        and scourged his skin with fagots
and scorched his skin with fagots

Mosiah 19:24        after they had ended the ceremony
after they had ended the sermon

Mosiah 21:28        king Mosiah had a gift from God
king Benjamin had a gift from God

Mosiah 25:2          which was a descendant of Mulek
which was a descendant of Muloch

Mosiah 25:6          [omit]

and his brethren and all their afflictions
and he also read the account of Ammon

Mosiah 26:9          Alma did not know concerning them
Alma did know concerning them

but there were many witnesses against them
for there were many witnesses against them

Mosiah 26:23        it is I that granteth … unto the end a place
it is I that granteth … in the end a place

Mosiah 27:30        but now that they may foresee that …
but now I know that they may foresee that …

Mosiah 28:4          suffering much and fearing
and suffering much fearing

Mosiah 29:42        Alma was appointed to be the first chief judge
Alma was appointed to be the chief judge

Alma 1:24               they were remembered no more among the people
they were numbered no more among the people

Alma 2:30               to save and preserve this people
to save and protect this people

Alma 3:5                 save it were skin which was girded about their loins
save it were a skin which was girded about their loins

Alma 5:1                 Alma began to deliver the word of God
Alma began to declare the word of God

Alma 5:35               and ye shall not be hewn down
and ye shall not be cut down

Alma 10:2               I am the son of Giddonah
I am the son of Gidanah

Alma 10:5               his mysteries and his marvelous powers
his mysteries and his miraculous powers

Alma 11:2               or be stripped or be cast out
or be striped or be cast out

Alma 11:6               an ezrom of silver
an ezrum of silver

Alma 11:16             a shiblum is a half of a shiblon
a shilum is a half of a shiblon

Alma 11:21             and this Zeezrom began to question Amulek
and thus Zeezrom began to question Amulek

Alma 11:44             and shall be brought … before the bar of Christ
and all shall be brought … before the bar of Christ

Alma 12:14             for our words will condemn us
for our works will condemn us

Alma 17:1               he met with the sons of Mosiah
he met the sons of Mosiah

Alma 17:26             which was called the water of Sebus
which was called the waters of Sebus

Alma 17:31             we will preserve the flocks unto the king
we will restore the flocks unto the king

Alma 18:25             and he answered and said unto him
and he answered unto him

Alma 19:30             she clasped her hands
she clapped her hands

The results for part 4 of volume 4 are like those of part 1 since the original manuscript is basically extant for Alma 21-55:

995 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

422 differences between the critical text and the standard text

150 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

93 in O only; 12 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 28 in both O and P;

17 conjectured readings

56 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

16 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

4 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 4 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

Alma 24:5               they came forth to the land of Midian
they came forth to the land of Middoni

Alma 24:20             for the purpose of destroying the king
for the purpose of dethroning the king

Alma 27:27             they were among the people of Nephi
they were numbered among the people of Nephi

Alma 29:11             and by this did establish his church
and by them did establish his church

Alma 31:35             and many of them are our brethren
and many of them are our near brethren

Alma 32:2               success among the poor class of people
success among the poorer class of the people

Alma 33:21             that ye might be healed
that ye might behold

Alma 39:13             and that wrong which ye have done
and repair that wrong which ye have done

Alma 41:5               the one raised to happiness
the one restored to happiness

Alma 42:2               yea he drew out the man
yea he drove out the man

Alma 42:16             except there were a punishment (which also was
except there were a punishment (which also was

as eternal as the life of the soul should be affixed affixed
as eternal as the life of the soul) should be, affixed

Alma 43:6               they were all Amlicites and Zoramites
they were all of the Amlicites and the Zoramites

Alma 43:14             now those descendants were as numerous
now those dissenters were as numerous

Alma 43:38             by their swords and the loss of blood
by their wounds and the loss of blood

Alma 43:45             for their rites of worship and their church
for their rights of worship and their church

Alma 44:8               we will not suffer ourselves to take an oath unto you
we will suffer ourselves to make an oath unto you

Alma 44:13             saying unto them with a loud voice,  saying   …
crying unto them with a loud voice, saying …

Alma 46:34             he had power according to his will
he had power to do according to his will

Alma 47:13             if he would make him Amalickiah a second leader
if he would make him Amalickiah the second leader

Alma 48:8               banks of earth round about to enclose his armies
banks of earth round about to encircle his armies

Alma 48:21             in the latter end of the nineteenth year yea
in the latter end of the nineteenth year

Alma 49:5               in preparing their places of security
in repairing their places of security

Alma 49:28             because of his matchless power
because of his miraculous power

Alma 51:7               and also many of the people of liberty
and also among the people of liberty

Alma 51:15             desiring that he should read it
desiring that he should heed it

Alma 51:26             many cities : the city of Nephihah
many cities : the city of Moroni

Alma 53:6               in the land of Nephi
in the land of the Nephites

Alma 54:13             we have only sought to defend ourselves
we have only sought to defend our lives

Alma 54:24             and behold now I am a bold Lamanite
and behold I am now a bold Lamanite

The results for part 5 of volume 4 are in many respects quite different from other parts of the text since both P and the 1830 edition are firsthand copies of O for much of the text for this part; O is also extant for parts of the text, which helps in reconstructing the original text:

906 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

349 differences between the critical text and the standard text

100 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

25 in O only; 50 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 13 in both O and P;

12 conjectured readings

27 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

2 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 5 of volume 4:

Current reading (or equivalent)       Revised reading

Alma 56:10             because of the numerority of their forces
because of the enormity of their forces

Alma 56:19             but thus were we preserved
but thus were we favored

Alma 56:37             and as we suppose it was their intent
and as we supposed that it was their intent

Alma 56:48             we do not doubt our mothers knew it
we do not doubt; our mothers knew

Alma 57:32             they did rise up in rebellion
they did raise up in rebellion

Alma 58:2               they were so much more numerous
they were so exceeding more numerous

Alma 58:4               to the governor of our land
to the great governor of our land

Alma 58:33             behold we trust in our God who …
behold we trust that it is our God who …

Alma 59:8               they came even and joined the army
they came over and joined the army

Alma 59:9               than to retake it from them
<omit>

Helaman 1:9           they sent forth one Kishkumen
they sent forth one Kishcumen

Helaman 1:29         and thus he did and he did head them
and thus he did head them

Helaman 2:4           for there was one Gadianton
for there was one Gaddianton

Helaman 3:3           in the forty and sixth yea there were …
in the forty and sixth year there were …

Helaman 4:12         and deserting away
and dissenting away

Helaman 4:25         exceedingly more numerous
more exceeding numerous

Helaman 6:20         every means in their power
every means whatsoever was in their power

Helaman 6:21         the more part of the Nephites
the more parts of the Nephites

Helaman 7:10         the garden gate which led by the highway
the garden gate which was by the highway

Helaman 7:16         how could ye have given way
how could ye have given away

Helaman 8:11         the waters … parted hither and thither
the waters … departed hither and thither

Helaman 8:19         even since the days of Abraham
ever since the days of Abraham

Helaman 8:20         and also Ezias and also Isaiah
and also Ezaias and also Isaiah

Helaman 9:36         that I Nephi know nothing concerning …
that I Nephi knew nothing concerning …

Helaman 12:15       for surely it is the earth that moveth
for sure it is the earth that moveth

Helaman 12:22       and woe unto him to whom he shall say this
and woe unto whom he shall say this

Helaman 14:5         there shall a new star arise
there shall be a new star arise

Helaman 16:3         when they saw that they could not …
when they saw this, that they could not …

Helaman 16:11       and these were the conditions
and thus were the conditions

3 Nephi 2:18          they did come forth
they did come forth again

3 Nephi 4:28          they did fell the tree to the earth
they did fall the tree to the earth

3 Nephi 5:9            a shorter but true account
a more short but a true account

3 Nephi 7:3            and thus they became tribes
and thus there became tribes

3 Nephi 9:9            the people of the king of Jacob
the people of the king Jacob

3 Nephi 9:21          I have come unto the world
I have come into the world

3 Nephi 10:4  <omit>
O ye people of the house of Israel

3 Nephi 11:0          Jesus Christ did show himself
Jesus Christ sheweth himself

3 Nephi 11:8          and behold they saw a Man
and behold they saw a man

3 Nephi 14:4          let me pull the mote out of thine eye
let me pull out the mote out of thine eye

3 Nephi 16:6          the Holy Ghost which witnesses unto them
the Holy Ghost which witness unto them

3 Nephi 16:15        but if they will not turn unto me
but if they will not return unto me

3 Nephi 16:17        and then the words … shall be fulfilled
and when the words … shall be fulfilled

3 Nephi 17:5          and beheld they were in tears
and behold they were in tears

3 Nephi 18:13        the gates of hell is ready, open to receive them
the gates of hell is already open to receive them

3 Nephi 18:16        I have set an example for you
I have set an example before you

3 Nephi 18:34        which hath been among you
which hath been among you beforetimes

Finally, in August 2009 the last part of volume 4 was published, with the following statistical summary of the analysis:

811 cases of variation (or potential variation) analyzed

304 differences between the critical text and the standard text

52 readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition:

1 in O only; 27 in P only (in cases where O is not extant); 1 in both O and P;

23 conjectured readings

47 readings that make a difference that would show up in translation

17 readings that make the Book of Mormon more consistent in phraseology or usage

4 readings that restore a unique phrase or word choice to the text

These results are much like those for parts 2 and 3 since O is generally not extant for the last part of the Book of Mormon text. Here are some of the more significant changes proposed for the text in part 6 of volume 4:

Current  reading (or equivalent)
Revised reading

3 Nephi 21:9          and there shall be among them those
and there shall be many among them

3 Nephi 21:16        and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy land
and I will cut off witchcrafts out of thy hand

3 Nephi 22:4          and shalt not remember the reproach of thy youth
<omit>

3 Nephi 22:17        every tongue that shall revile against thee
every tongue that shall rise against thee

3 Nephi 25:2          the Son of righteousness arise
the Sun of righteousness arise

3 Nephi 28:3          blessed are ye because ye desired this thing
blessed are ye because ye desire this thing

3 Nephi 28:36        I knew not whether they were cleansed
I knew not whether they were changed

4 Nephi 1:27          there were many churches which professed to know the Christ
there were churches which professed to know the Christ
Mormon 2:4           we did come to the city of Angola
we did come to the city of Angolah

Mormon 4:14         many prisoners both women and children

many prisoners of women and of children

Mormon 6:14         and Jeneum had fallen with his ten thousand
and Joneum had fallen with his ten thousand

Mormon 6:15         and a few which had deserted over unto the Lamanites
and a few which had dissented over unto the Lamanites

Mormon 8:9           save it be the Lamanites and robbers
save it be Lamanites and robbers

Mormon 8:10         and whether they be upon the face of the land no man knoweth
and whither they be upon the face of the land no man knoweth

Mormon 8:28         leaders of churches and teachers shall rise
leaders of churches and teachers shall be lifted up

Ether 1:34               Jared his brother said unto him
therefore Jared his brother said unto him

Ether 1:41               and gather together … thy families
and gather together … thy family

Ether 1:43               and thus I will do unto thee
and this I will do unto thee

Ether 2:11               until the fullness come
until the fullness be come

Ether 2:13               and they dwelt in tents and dwelt in tents
and they dwelt in tents

Ether 2:14             at the end of four years
at the end of the four years

Ether 2:25               for ye cannot cross this great deep
for how be it / ye cannot cross this great deep

Ether 3:1                 he did carry them in his hands upon the top
he did carry them in his hands up on the top

Ether 3:18               and all this that this man knew that …
and all this because that this man knew that …

Ether 4:1                 and for this cause did king Mosiah keep them
and for this cause did king Benjamin keep them

Ether 6:5                 there should be a furious wind blow
there should a furious wind blow

Ether 8:24               or woe be unto it
for woe be unto it

Ether 9:2                 which did not seek his destruction
which were not or which did not seek his destruction

Ether 9:22               yea and he even saw the Son of righteousness
yea and he even saw the Sun of righteousness

Ether 11:4               and Shiblom reigned in his stead
and Shiblon reigned in his stead

Ether 12:2               for he could not be restrained
for he could not be constrained

Ether 12:4               which hope cometh of faith maketh an anchor
which hope cometh of faith and maketh an anchor

Ether 13:31             and there was none to restrain them
and there was none to constrain them

Ether 14:2 and of his wives and children
and they of his wife and children

Ether 14:12             he fled to the borders upon the seashore
he fled to the borders by the seashore

Ether 14:17             and he did slay both women and children
and he did slay both men women and children

Ether 14:28             the valley of Shurr was near the hill Comnor
the valley of Shurr was near the hill Comron

Moroni 7:16           and to persuade to believe in Christ
and persuadeth to believe in Christ

Moroni 7:26           and by faith they become the sons of God
and by faith they became the sons of God

Moroni 9:24           many of our brethren have deserted over
many of our brethren have dissented over

Moroni 9:24           and many more will also desert over unto them
and many more will also dissent over unto them

Moroni 10:34         before the pleasing bar of the great Jehovah
before the pleading bar of the great Jehovah

3. What other volumes will be published as part of this project?

(a) Volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon

In this third volume, I will discuss each step in the transmission of the text, including Joseph Smith’s dictating of the text and his scribes’ writing it down (the original manuscript), their copying of the text into the printer’s manuscript, the typesetting of the first (1830) edition, and the publishing of 19 significant editions since then (the 1837 and 1840 under Joseph Smith’s direction, plus 12 more within the LDS textual tradition, and 5 within the RLDS textual tradition). This volume will examine some of the important issues regarding how Joseph Smith translated and what kind of text was revealed to him. Each edition will also be examined in terms of its editing history. Each type of grammatical editing will be thoroughly described in this volume. There will also be a lined-up comparison between the biblical quotations from the King James Bible and the corresponding Book of Mormon passages.

In 2002 I decided that I could not produce volume 3 without first determining what the original text was. For that reason, volume 4 has been published first – and also in parts, so that the reading public will have time to examine the textual analysis in manageable segments.

(b) Volume 5, A Complete Electronic Collation of the Book of Mormon

This last volume will be available in an electronic format. A few printed copies of the collation will be prepared for archival purposes. In this volume, the entire text for both manuscripts and the 20 editions is lined up and compared, with every difference specified – not only word and phrase differences, but also punctuation, capitalization, spelling, paragraphing, versification, and so forth. The differences will be categorized and can be searched in terms of the type of change. I am planning to make this electronic collation available at the same time volume 3 is published.

4. What are some of the major findings of this project?

(a) The original manuscript supports the hypothesis that the text was given to Joseph Smith word for word and that he could see the spelling of the names (in support of what witnesses of the translation process claimed about Joseph’s translation – namely, that he spelled out the Book of Mormon names, at least when the name first appeared).

(b) The original text is much more consistent and systematic in expression than has ever been realized.

(c) There are a number of errors in the text that have never been corrected in any LDS or RLDS edition, although none of them fundamentally alter the text.

(d) There are occasional errors in the original manuscript itself (see, for instance, the reading “Ishmael and also his hole hole” in 1 Nephi 7:5); errors could enter the text from its very earliest transmission; many of the errors in the original manuscript show that this manuscript was written down from oral dictation.

(e) Errors in the printer’s manuscript clearly show that this manuscript was produced by visual copying from another text, not by oral dictation.

(f) Joseph Smith’s editing for the second and third editions (1837 and 1840) represents human editing, not a revealed revision of the text.

(g) The original text includes unique kinds of expression that appear to be uncharacteristic of English in any time and place; some of these expressions are Hebraistic in nature.

(h) The early transmission of the Book of Mormon text does not in general support the traditional assumptions of textual criticism – namely, the assumptions that the transmitted text tends to remove difficult readings and lengthen the text; instead, the early transmission of the Book of Mormon text tends to introduce more difficult readings and to omit words and phrases.

(i) The vocabulary of the Book of Mormon text appears to derive from the 1500s and the 1600s, not from the 1800s.

This last finding is quite remarkable. Lexical evidence suggests that the original text contained a number of expressions and words with meanings that were lost from the English language by 1700, including the following (with the date of their last citation in the Oxford English Dictionary given in parentheses):

to require ‘to request’ (1665)

Enos 1:18 reads “thy fathers have also required of me this thing”

[Ezra 8:22: “for I was ashamed to require of the king a band of soldiers and horsemen to help us against the enemy in the way”]

sermon ‘talk, discourse, speech’ (1594) [conjectural emendation]

Mosiah 19:24 should read “after they had ended the sermon”

(not the current reading “after they had ended the ceremony”)

to cast arrows ‘to shoot arrows’ (1609)

Alma 49:4 reads “the Lamanites could not cast their stones and their arrows at them”

[Proverbs 26:18: “as a mad man who casteth firebrands arrows and death”]

to counsel ‘to counsel with’ (1547)

Alma 37:37 originally read “counsel the Lord in all thy doings”

[similarly in Alma 39:10]

but if ‘unless’ (1596)

Mosiah 3:19 originally read “for the natural man is an enemy to God …

and will be forever and ever but if he yieldeth to the enticings of the Holy Spirit”

to depart ‘to part’ (1677)

Helaman 8:11 originally read “to smite upon the waters of the Red Sea

and they departed hither and thither”

extinct: in reference to an individual’s death (1675)

Alma 44:7 reads “and inflect the wounds of death in your bodies

that ye may become extinct” [similarly in several other places]

the pleading bar of God (not in the Oxford English Dictionary, but three early 1600 citations have been found, including one in a legal context) [conjectural emendation]

Jacob 6:13 should read “until I shall meet you before the pleading bar of God”, not “the pleasing bar of God” [similarly in Moroni 10:34]

As noted, only two of these instances of archaic vocabulary (dating from Early Modern English) are found in the 1611 King James Bible.

5. What have been the most significant events in the history of this project?

Besides the actual publishing of the volumes of the critical text themselves, there are two events that stand out:

(a) April 1991: two weeks spent in Independence, Missouri, making a careful examination of my transcript of the printer’s manuscript against the actual manuscript, with the assistance of my wife, Sirkku, and Ron Romig, archivist for the Community of Christ (then the RLDS Church).

(b) October 1991: three weeks working with Robert Espinosa and his fellow conservators at the BYU library on fragments of the original manuscript owned by the Wilford Wood family of Bountiful, Utah; these fragments were photographed in ultraviolet light by David Hawkinson and constitute about two percent of the original manuscript.

6. What has been your relationship with the LDS and RLDS Churches in this project?

This project began as an independent scholarly project, and I have made sure by legal agreements that this independence has been preserved. Since the beginning of this project (in 1988) the LDS Historical Department has provided full access to ultraviolet photographs of the original manuscript and has allowed me to directly examine the original manuscript as well as their enormous library of Book of Mormon editions. Without their cooperation, this project would never have been possible. Similarly, archivist Ron Romig, church historian Richard Howard (now retired), and the leadership of the Community of Christ (formerly the RLDS Church) have also been fully cooperative in providing access to the printer’s manuscript as well as an enlarged photocopy of that manuscript, plus their large collection of Book of Mormon editions.

In 1994 the LDS Church Scriptures Committee requested that I provide information about my findings on the text. For the next four to five years, this information was conveyed to the Scriptures Committee. Prior to submitting this information, however, the Church, BYU, and I signed a legally binding letter of understanding guaranteeing the independence of the critical text project, with these two important provisos: (1) I would hold the copyright to the critical text, and (2) I would exercise complete control over the content of the critical text, including my interpretations and analyses of the text.

The critical text project is a scholarly one and has not received any ecclesiastical approval or endorsement. The transcripts and the textual interpretations represent my own scholarly work, with peer review from a number of scholars (especially David Calabro, a graduate student in Hebrew studies at the University of Chicago). I have received no explicit response regarding any of my interpretations or suggestions for changes from the Church Scriptures Committee. The Church committee has had full access to my findings and is free to use them (or not use them) as they wish.

I have also retained the right to legally extend this freedom to use the results of the critical text project to anyone wishing to create their own single reading of the Book of Mormon text, including the Community of Christ and other churches as well as publishing firms interested in producing a noncritical edition of the Book of Mormon.

7. Will any of these changes appear in subsequent LDS editions of the Book of Mormon?

I do not know the answer to this question. The Church will decide for itself what changes, if any, will be implemented. The Church has never engaged in a public discussion of such changes or the arguments for making (or not making) those changes. On the other hand, this scholarly critical text project promotes public discussion and, when done properly, establishes an on-going process and allows others to contribute. For instance, as part of this project, I have requested anyone who has any suggestions for emendations to the text or questions about problematic readings to send them to me. Thus far I have received over a hundred suggestions for change – and about thirty percent of these have led to emendations in the text. Surprisingly, most of these emendations have come not from scholars but from regular members of the Church – readers of the Book of Mormon who are simply striving to understand the text. Such an open request for participation has significantly improved the findings of this project.

One important fact that I realized early on in this project is that the original text is not fully recoverable by scholarly means. Only 28 percent of the Book of Mormon text is extant in the original manuscript. Over half of the new readings that have never appeared in any standard printed edition derive from readings in the original manuscript. Oliver Cowdery averaged about three textual changes per manuscript page as he copied from the original manuscript into the printer’s manuscript. The clear majority of these changes would be unrecoverable if those portions of the original manuscript were not extant. In most cases we have no clue that there is even an error in the current text unless the original manuscript tells us so. Given that the majority of the original manuscript is no longer extant, we will be unable to fully recover the original text by human means. And even the extant portions of the original manuscript probably have errors that we are unaware of. The only way that the original text could be fully restored would be if the Lord chose to reveal it again. Such is definitely not within the purview of this scholarly project.

One valuable aspect of this public, scholarly discussion of the text is that later changes in the text could be made by the Church without engendering the typical complaint that the Church is making changes for political reasons. Note, in particular, the uproar over the 1981 change in 2 Nephi 30:6 from “a white and a delightsome people” to “a pure and a delightsome people”. The change was first implemented in the 1840 edition; Joseph Smith’s motivation for making that change was based on quite something else, as I argue in part 2 of volume 4 under 2 Nephi 30:6. An independent public discussion in a scholarly context will avoid having the Church take abuse for making alterations to the text.

8. Does this project have an apologetic purpose? In other words, is one of its purposes to defend the Book of Mormon against detractors?

My task, as I have always seen it, is to recover the original English-language text to the extent scholarly and academic analysis will allow. I have therefore restricted my discussion to the text per se and have completely avoided discussions of whether there are practices found among the cultures of the world (including the Americas) in support of particular readings. Nor have I engaged in any discussion of external evidences for the Book of Mormon, including questions of geography, genetics, and archaeology.

My initial endeavor as editor of the critical text project was to produce a detailed transcription of the original and printer’s manuscripts. And right from the beginning, I discovered errors that had crept into the text as Oliver Cowdery and the other scribes produced the printer’s manuscript from the original manuscript. Within a year or so I recognized that I would not be able to completely recover the original text by scholarly methods. Yet at the same time, I began to see considerable evidence for the traditional interpretation that witnesses of the translation process claimed: (1) the text was given word for word, (2) Book of Mormon names were frequently spelled out the first time they occurred in the text, and (3) during dictation there was no rewriting of the text except to correct errors in taking down the dictation. Joseph Smith was literally reading off an already composed English-language text. The evidence in the manuscripts and in the language of the text itself supports the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon was a precisely determined text. I do not consider this conclusion apologetic, but instead as one demanded by the evidence.

The opposing viewpoint, that Joseph Smith got ideas and he translated them into his own English, cannot be supported by the manuscript and textual evidence. The only substantive argument for this alternative view has been the nonstandard nature of the text, with its implication that God would never speak ungrammatical English, so the nonstandard usage must be the result of Joseph Smith putting the ideas he received into his own language. Yet with the recent finding that the original vocabulary of the text appears to be dated from the 1500s and 1600s (not the 1800s), we now need to consider the possibility that the ungrammaticality of the original text may also date from that earlier period of time, not necessarily from Joseph’s own time and place. Joseph Smith is not the author of the Book of Mormon, nor is he actually the translator. Instead, he was the revelator: through him the Lord revealed the English-language text (by means of the interpreters, later called the Urim and Thummim, and the seer stone). Such a view is consistent, I believe, with Joseph’s use elsewhere of the verb translate to mean ‘transmit’ and the noun translation to mean ‘transmission’ (as in the eighth Article of Faith).

I should also point out that my personal testimony of the Book of Mormon is not dependent upon my work on this project. The Book of Mormon stands on its own and is ultimately not dependent on how that text may vary in printed editions or in the manuscripts. Moroni promised that the Lord will give a testimony of the book to the prayerful reader – irrespective of any infelicities and errors in the text (which Moroni recognized could be there, as he himself noted in the last sentence on the title page of the Book of Mormon). I received my own personal witness of this book long before I ever began work on this project. I have never needed to prove to myself that the text is from the Lord. Nor have errors in the text ever prevented the Spirit from bearing witness that the book is the Lord’s.

My own personal witness of this book dates from 1979, when I was reading the book during a time of difficulty. I was reading the words that king Lamoni’s queen expresses as she comes out of her state of unconsciousness:

Alma 19:29-30 (original text)

she arose and stood upon her feet and cried with a loud voice saying

O blessed Jesus who has saved me from an awful hell

O blessed God have mercy on this people

and when she had said this she clapped her hands being filled with joy

speaking many words which were not understood

As I was reading this passage, the Spirit witnessed to me, “This really happened.” What is interesting about this passage is that I didn’t actually read “she clapped her hands” (the reading based on the printer’s manuscript), but instead I read “she clasped her hands” (the reading found in the 1830 edition as well as in all LDS editions). Now I do not take this personal witness as evidence that I should reject the earliest reading, clapped. It simply means that the Lord witnesses the truthfulness of this book irrespective of the minor errors that may have crept in. I know of no error that changes any doctrine or the basic account of the text. There is no error, awkward expression, or ungrammaticality in any of the printed editions of the book that will prevent the honest reader from gaining a testimony of the Book of Mormon.

9. So why should we be interested in recovering the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon?

The major thrust of this project is oriented towards scholars, not the lay readers of the book. There is no reason to restore in the current standard text the nonstandard language and the non-English Hebraisms that were largely eliminated by Joseph Smith himself in his editing of the text for the second (1837) edition. On the other hand, many of the word and phrase changes proposed by the critical text project (such as those listed under question 2 above) make the text much more systematic and consistent. The Church (especially in its 1920 and 1981 editions) has sought to print an accurate text, including the restoration of original readings (providing the language itself is standard English).

From a scholarly perspective, restoring the original text provides new ways of viewing the Book of Mormon text. By studying the language of the text, I have seen much that confirms my personal testimony of the book as well as what early witnesses of the translation were able to observe.

10. Won’t changing the text prove embarrassing for some commentaries and interpretations by church leaders and scholars?

I do not think this is much of a problem. There are so few examples where restoring an original reading will cause difficulties for previous commentary. In virtually every case, the original text will reinforce and make gospel principles even clearer. As an example, there is the passage in Alma 39:13 where Alma tells his son Corianton (in the current text) to “return unto them [the Zoramites] and acknowledge your faults and that wrong which ye have done”. Yet the original text read here “return unto them and acknowledge your faults and repair that wrong which ye have done”. The original text emphasizes that repentance involves more than saying “I’m sorry”: it requires us to do all we can to make restitution for our sins. This doctrine is, of course, supported by other passages in the Book of Mormon (see, for instance, Helaman 5:17).

One place where the original reading will lead to some revision of commentary deals with the parenthetical phrase that Joseph Smith added to the 1840 edition in 1 Nephi 20:1, which explains that the phrase “the waters of Judah” means ‘the waters of baptism’. The 1920 edition removed the parentheses that Joseph had placed around the extra phrase “or out of the waters of baptism”, which has subsequently led some church writers to interpret the additional phraseology as part of the original Isaiah text, with a few writers even accusing ancient Jewish scribes as having purposely removed a clear Old Testament reference to baptism from the book of Isaiah!

11. Would it be worth doing textual criticism for the translations of the English-language Book of Mormon into other languages?

Yes. In fact, I can think of one very specific aspect that could be of tremendous benefit to my own project – namely, the question of how translators have dealt with problematic passages. Their solutions may suggest possible conjectural emendations for the English-language text. As an example, consider the English-language reading for Mosiah 17:13: “they took him and bound him and scourged his skin with fagots yea even unto death”. This passage literally states that Abinadi was whipped to death with bundles of sticks. I have conjectured that the word scourged here is a mishearing for scorched, the verb used in the next verse (Mosiah 17:14) to refer to Abinadi’s death by fire (“and now when the flames began to scorch him”). And some foreign language translators have also realized that the text intends to say that Abinadi was burnt to death and have therefore substituted for scourged a verb that is equivalent to burning rather than whipping. Some students in my class on textual criticism have involved themselves in projects of this sort, but their work has been limited to a few languages and only to checking whether the English-language conjectures proposed in this project can be found in any of the translations. It would undoubtedly be worthwhile checking the other side of the coin: Are there readings in the translations that suggest conjectures for the English-language text?

12. What role has your theory of Analogical Modeling played in the Book of Mormon project?

Analogical Modeling (AM) is a theory of language that I have worked on since the 1970s. The traditional method for describing language has been in terms of rules, but in Analogical Modeling there are no rules, only examples (instances) of past behavior that a speaker uses to understand and produce language. AM is actually a general theory of description that uses both nearest neighbors and not-so-near neighbors (under certain well-defined conditions of homogeneity) to predict behavior.

AM has been implicitly used in many aspects of the critical text project, particularly in finding instances of usage for testing the reliability of readings. One important characteristic of the Book of Mormon – one that is very helpful in establishing the text – is the size of the book (584 pages of canonical text in the 1830 edition). The specific language of the text is sufficiently repeated throughout the book so that there are usually enough exemplars to make a reasoned analysis for any given expression or phrase. It has not, in my opinion, been fully appreciated how huge a scriptural text the Book of Mormon is and what an advantage that is in analyzing and establishing its text.

In distinction to the findings of computerized stylistic analyses of the Book of Mormon text, I have found that many expressions, phrases, and words extend throughout the text, such as the term pleading bar by both Jacob and Moroni (in Jacob 6:13 and Moroni 10:34) or the precise expression “yea even the sword of the justice of the eternal God” by both Nephi and Moroni (in 1 Nephi 12:18 and Ether 8:23). Sometimes Jacob uses expressions that are unique to him (at least in the original text), such as “the commands of God”. As many readers have recognized, every time Jacob starts to speak or write, his flowing style is almost immediately distinguishable from his brother Nephi’s complex syntax – and it doesn’t take a statistical analysis of function words within passages of five thousand words to figure this out!

As a result of my work in AM, I have continually attempted to look for exemplars that might be responsible for creating errors in the Book of Mormon text. As an example, in 2 Nephi 20:29 all the printed editions as well as the printer’s manuscript read Ramath instead of the Ramah found in Isaiah 10:29 (the original manuscript is not extant for this passage). A number of scholars have noted that Ramath would have been the earlier Hebrew form for Ramah and have therefore claimed that the Book of Mormon text here maintains the earlier Hebrew name for this place, thus showing that the Book of Mormon text was translated from a more ancient version of the book of Isaiah. What has not been noticed in all of this discussion is that within the Book of Mormon quotation for Isaiah 2-14 (found in 2 Nephi 12-24), a number of names are misspelled in the printer’s manuscript. The 1830 typesetter corrected all of these misspellings by reference to his own King James Bible – except for the case of Ramath. And for each of these misspelled names there is an analogical source for the misspelling – either a nearby word in the Isaiah quotation or a common English word or biblical name:

In the case of Ramath, we find Hamath earlier in the same chapter (2 Nephi 20:9). Another influence that would have led Oliver Cowdery to write Ramath instead of the correct Ramah would have been the name Aiath, found in the immediately preceding verse (2 Nephi 20:28). In fact, these two earlier occurrences of names ending in -ath could have readily misled the 1830 typesetter into thinking that he didn’t need to check his King James Bible for the spelling Ramath.

Three AM books have been published and are all available, two authored by me and one edited by me and colleagues:

(a) Analogical Modeling of Language (Kluwer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1989)

(b) Analogy and Structure (Kluwer: Dordrecht, The Netherlands, 1992)

(c) Analogical Modeling: An Exemplar-Based Approach to Language, edited by Royal Skousen, Deryle Lonsdale, and Dilworth B. Parkinson (John Benjamins: Amsterdam, 2002)

These books are rather technical. For a general introduction to AM, see my article “Analogical Modeling: Exemplars, Rules, and Quantum Computing”, Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society (Berkeley, California: Berkeley Linguistics Society, 2003), pages 425-39. A preprint version of this paper is available from our research group’s AM website: <http://humanities.byu.edu/am/>.