Joseph and the Book of Mormon
A response to an article.
*The following is my response to the article linked above.*
You bring up some interesting points that are worthy of consideration. I respect where you’re coming from, and there is a lot to be said for the sheer amount of research you did on this topic.
However, there are a few points I would like to make.
Stumbling
The examples you give of “Joseph” stumbling over his words could potentially point to an oral creation in a normal literary context. However, in the context of the Book of Mormon, these examples don’t require an oral dictation by Joseph to be the original source.
The medium of the Book of Mormon is unique. It’s what really sets the context of the Book of Mormon apart from all other literature. The authors are inscribing directly onto metal.
Let’s say they inscribe something that they wish to alter — or a phrase on which they wish to elaborate. (Not a very far-fetched proposal, even if they did have some sort of first draft codex or something.) What do they do? There aren’t erasers. There isn’t a backspace button. All they have at their disposal is the forward flow of new words. When I type something, I usually go back and change things before I publish. Mormon et al. had no such luxury.
Interestingly, when the narrators/abridgers are quoting pre-written sermons and dialogue, the flow of words is much smoother and more polished.
We have to think of their medium before holding them to our standards of contemporary literature.
In fact, Moroni addressed the Lord about this very issue in Ether chapter 12:
25 Thou hast also made our words powerful and great, even that we cannot write them; wherefore, when we write we behold our weakness, and stumble because of the placing of our words; and I fear lest the Gentiles shall mock at our words.
26 And when I had said this, the Lord spake unto me, saying: Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness.
Voice
The literary voices found in the Book of Mormon are unique. However, in no cases do they ever reflect the voice or style of Joseph Smith (a feat that’s next to impossible for an essentially unedited oral creation — especially for a first-time author).
More than that, there are three main narrators in the Book of Mormon: Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. Each has a distinctive and internally consistent voice. In fact, these narrators’ literary voices are so different from each other that Grant Hardy had enough material to write a highly-acclaimed 300 page book on the topic.
Linguistics
Doctor of linguistics, Royal Skousen, has spent decades analyzing the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon. No scholar knows the original text better than him. Here he shares the reasons why the original text “demands” that Joseph read directly from a pre-made text while dictating — just like Joseph said he read from the Urim and Thumim and the seer stone. This is an important point, unless you’re willing to throw out virtually every first-hand account of the translation process. (But throwing out that many first hand accounts is generally frowned upon by historians.)
As editor of the Book of Mormon critical text project and The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale University Press, 2009), my task has been to recover the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon to the extent scholarly and academic analysis will allow.
…
I began to see considerable evidence for the traditional interpretation that witnesses of the translation process claimed: (a) the text was orally dictated, word for word; (b) Book of Mormon names were frequently spelled out the first time they occurred in the text, thus indicating that Joseph Smith could see the spelling of the names; and (c) during dictation there was no rewriting of the text except to correct errors in taking down the dictation. Since then I have also discovered internal evidence from the original language itself that argues for a fully determined English-language text:
1) The original text is much more consistent and systematic in phraseology and vocabulary than has ever been realized.
2) Sometimes passages of text are the same, word for word, even though they are found in completely different parts of the book.
3) The original text includes unique kinds of expression that appear to be uncharacteristic of English in any time and place; some of these expressions can be considered Hebraistic in nature.
4) The vocabulary of the earliest Book of Mormon text appears to derive from the 1500s and 1600s, not from the 1800s.
Joseph Smith was literally reading off an already composed English-language text. Taken as a whole, the evidence in the manuscripts and in the language of the earliest text supports the hypothesis that the Book of Mormon was a precise 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 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 original 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 date 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.
The evidence basically argues that Joseph Smith was not the author of the Book of Mormon, nor was 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).
The full article can be found here.
Literary Coherence
When a person honestly considers the incredible level of literary coherence in the Book of Mormon, it becomes very difficult to imagine a 24 year old farm hand keeping every detail (geography, timing, names, prophecies, etc.) perfectly straight in his memory while simultaneously creating a masterpiece that would move millions to come closer to Christ.
I’ll finish with an excerpt from the introduction of The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition by Grant Hardy. He said it much better than I can:
The Book of Mormon exhibits a high degree of literary coherence. In the book of Mosiah, for example, simultaneous stories about several different groups of people are skillfully woven together, and throughout the volume there is a constant interplay of references both forward (in the form of prophecies) and backward.
Though the text never explicitly lays out its intricate scheme of edited plates and records, passing references are consistent with one another, as are the numerous references to geography.
Mormon researchers, following the lead of Hugh Nibley, have identified passages that seem to correlate with ancient patterns of warfare, agriculture, festivals, and naming that would have been unknown to Joseph Smith in the 1820s.
Others have pointed out that the early chapters concerning Lehi’s family in Arabia are supported by old-world archaeology and have identified sophisticated poetic and literary techniques that are integrated into the text.
There are examples of allegory (1 Nephi 8 and Jacob 5), apocalypse (1 Nephi 11– 14), prophetic interpretation (1 Nephi 22), midrash (2 Nephi 26– 27), typology (Alma 37), and rhetorically compelling sermons (Mosiah 1– 4, Alma 5, and Moroni 7).
It is possible to imagine Joseph Smith developing ideas about Nephite history and literature in his head over the course of several years, yet those who hold this theory have to account for the fact that this rich, intricate, internally consistent text was produced in a most unusual manner. The eyewitnesses to the translation process are virtually unanimous in reporting what they saw: Joseph would put a small seer stone into his hat and then, placing his face in the hat to block the light, would dictate the Book of Mormon aloud while various scribes wrote down his words.
This process was open and observable by all in the household because it did not require Joseph to directly consult the plates, which at times were wrapped in linen on the table or even hidden elsewhere. His wife, Emma, recalled that he never worked from notes or a script; and whenever he took a break, he would begin again exactly where he left off, without seeing the manuscript or having anyone read back to him the last few sentences he had translated. In this manner, a 588-page book was created over a three-month period and was published essentially as it was dictated, with almost no rewrites or revisions.
This story is further complicated by the fact that Joseph Smith did not produce the text in chronological order. After the loss of the first 116 manuscript pages (see below), he dictated the last three-fourths of the book (Mosiah through Moroni, which includes the unchronological Jaredite addition) before returning to the beginning of Nephite history to dictate the first 150 pages (1 Nephi through the Words of Mormon).
The book of Ether offers one more striking example of narrative complexity: the genealogy in the first chapter provides the framework for the chronicle of Jaredite kings in chapters 6 through 11. That is, Joseph dictated a long string of twenty-seven unusual names and then several pages later repeated the list, but this time with stories attached to each name. If he were composing as he went along, this would be quite a feat of memory, especially since the names in the narrative portion are in reverse order from the way they appear in the genealogical list.
Regardless of what one may believe about its origin, the Book of Mormon is a remarkable document. As Terryl Givens has written: “The naked implausibility of gold plates, seer stones, and warrior-angels finds little by way of scientific corroboration, but attributing to a young farmboy the 90-day dictated and unrevised production of a 500-page narrative that incorporates sophisticated literary structures, remarkable Old World parallels, and some 300 references to chronology and 700 to geography with virtually perfect self-consistency is problematic as well.”
Grant Hardy (2003–06–11). The Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Edition University of Illinois Press. Kindle Edition.
