© 2025 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.
Yes, Brian, critics suspend their own disbelief when they are bent on explaining the Book of Mormon naturalistically. Yet he couldn’t even have worded it from revealed ideas, as the extensive use of archaic and nonbiblical / non-pseudo-archaic vocabulary and syntax show.
When Van Wagoner summed up research as concluding that no elements were beyond Joseph’s ability, none of that research involved thorough comparative study of the English usage of the original text. Simply put, that’s a rash and inaccurate observation.
Indisputably, the Book of Mormon has many phrases and vocabulary and syntax that Joseph Smith didn’t know. So, even stipulating him to be a creative genius, he couldn’t have worded the text the way it is.
Unfortunately, LDS researchers were led down the wrong path once B. H. Roberts emphatically wrote that Joseph must have worded it, due to the “bad” grammar. So when Widtsoe commented on how the Book of Mormon had advanced vocabulary that seems to have been beyond Joseph’s lexical knowledge, Widtsoe nevertheless fell back, confusedly, to the incorrect Roberts position.
I appreciate the observations. I greatly appreciate your work (with Royal Skousen) showing the level of sophistication in the nonstandard vocabulary and syntax in the BofM. I didn’t know the history of Roberts assessment. It is understandable that critics often quote Roberts as if research ended with his opinions (think also of his 20 BofM parallels).
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that so many skeptics immediately ascribe the nonstandard grammar to JS’s poor education. Such low-hanging fruit–difficult to resist. The problem is how JS could successfully negotiate so many other complexities in the BofM dictation (77 storylines, 207 characters, 147 geographic locations, editorial promises, parallel poetic devices, 87,000+ words of highly nuanced religious discourse, etc.), but didn’t understand basic Modern English grammar?
I think Van Wagonner’s assessment was just wishful thinking. In the absence of a rational explanation for the literary skills JS exhibited daily while dictating the BofM, superficial claims may be too easily adopted.
I really appreciate it this work. I also appreciate your writing style and layout. It made me feel like a rockstar, as if I could read a lot and understand quickly.
Initially, I thought you could add much detail to the section on “specialized knowledge.” For example, since we were recently talking about Nephi’s bow… You could mention the need to know about weapons production in addition to olive tree husbandry. But I think your approach is much better. If you had say, 100 examples of the specialized knowledge needed it would distract from everything else. A critic could focus on a very small piece and take away from the whole thing.
So I really appreciate the strength of this approach. Very clean, straightforward, and solid.
I am wondering if you could express your idea numerically. It is often hard to cite the odds of the Book of Mormon being true… For example, speaking of what we find in 2 Nephi, there is no model to answer the odds of the person translating an ancient document and then finding the same variants in a cave 100 years later.
But perhaps you could quantify the number of farmers with an excellent memory, specialized training, excellent organizational skills and so on. You could answer the question: what are the odds a random farmer possesses all these skills. This could perhaps be a surrogate for the odds we are interested in. I guess it would be the odds of the Book of Mormon potentially being false. Of course it would still be an underestimate. You would have to also assume why someone with all these skills would make such a fraud and such.
Thank you again.
Hi Martin,
I appreciate the kind comments.
I also apologize, but I haven’t been much of a fan of hypotheticals. It seems that quantifying the “odds” for JS’s 1829 skills through speculation might have some usefulness, but not very much.
But to more directly address your question, I think the memory and recall skills JS exhibited are beyond human performance maximums: Over 400 names were recalled with 99.9% accuracy through over 6000 recall events during the three-month dictation. If true, then the odds are zero that any human could do it. And, of course, this is just one of the ten skills I have identified as being needed to dictate the BofM.
I do appreciate your comments because they represent part of a new conversation that I think Book of Mormon scholars deserve. Researchers benefit (in my view) by looking at the origin of the Book of Mormon through the lens of “skills.”
Happy holidays,
Brian Hales