© 2024 The Interpreter Foundation. A 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
All content by The Interpreter Foundation, unless otherwise specified, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available here.
Interpreter Foundation is not owned, controlled by or affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. All research and opinions provided on this site are the sole responsibility of their respective authors, and should not be interpreted as the opinions of the Board, nor as official statements of LDS doctrine, belief or practice.
“Abstract: The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project, . . began in 1988 and is now nearing completion.”
Correction: The FARMS Book of Mormon Critical Text Project began in 1979 under my editorship. From 1984 through 1987 FARMS published two editions of its three-volume Book of Mormon Critical Text. Thankfully, Royal took over the Project in 1988. The Project has now been running for an official total of about 36 years, even though I personally began working on it in 1974 — after reading Stan Larson’s BYU master’s thesis.
Such research projects take enormous amounts of time, energy, and money. Without the support of organizations like FARMS and its donors, they could never be brought to fruition.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of this work in advancing our knowledge of the Book of Mormon. You have my lasting gratitude!
I actually own (and have read most of) all six physical books of Volume 4, but I’m grateful you’re making it available in PDF form as well. I have found that Volume 4 is a tremendous aid to studying the Book of Mormon because of how it addresses language, concepts and terminology that is consistent and/or that varies throughout the text. By so doing, it time and again underscores the complexity and subtlety of the text — and thus renders increasingly unsupportable the claims that this was a 19th century invention of a barely-schooled young farmer.
And: twenty seven years. Whew. Bless you for sticking with it and for upholding such excellent academic standards in the project.
Fun and brightly written article. Your work will mean much for decades.
Will/is the Critical Text available in computer readable form? I do some work in natural language processing and would like to do some work on the most “raw” version of the BofM.
Thank you Brother Skousen. I think your work will yet help in ways we may be able to realize at this time.