Book of Mormon authorship literature review

The sources behind the authorship article, covering chiasmus, King James dependence, Isaiah, Hebraisms, names, narrative complexity, Early Modern English, source-book hypotheses and stylometry, with what each argues, its reason, how it was read, and whether it is cited.

Scope

This bibliography tracks nine separate questions, which the article keeps apart: whether the text's literary structure is ancient; how much of its English comes from the King James Bible and by what route; whether its Isaiah blocks can predate the exile; whether its agenda is that of 1820s New York; whether any named nineteenth-century book supplied its content; whether its grammar shows a Hebrew original; whether its names are attested in the ancient Near East beyond chance; whether its narrative complexity dates it; and whether computational authorship attribution can answer any of it.

Status key. Opened Aug 8, 2026 means the source was read in the session that wrote the article's footnote layer, and its wording was checked against the text quoted. Opened Aug 4, 2026 means it was read in the drafting session that produced the article and its research/ scripts. Opened Oct 1, 2026 means it was read in the session that completed the Hebraisms, names, narrative-complexity and stylometry sections;  the entry says by what route.  Not opened means exactly that, and the article's footnote says so.  Library keys are given in code text.  Direction is stated by what the source shows, not by what its author believes:  supports, undercuts or complicates the claim that the text is ancient.

The Spaulding–Rigdon hypothesis is not treated here. It has its own article and its own bibliography.

Chiasmus

  • John W. Welch, "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon", BYU Studies 10:1 (1969). Opened Aug 8, 2026. The founding paper. Its reason: chiasmus is an ancient Hebrew form, the King James translators normalized most inverted Hebrew word order into ordinary English, and therefore an 1829 New York farm boy had no route to the technique. The first two halves of that argument are good and underused; the third is the inference the article tests. Used for all four quotations in the chiasmus section.
  • Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards, "Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance?", BYU Studies 43:2 (2004). Opened Aug 8, 2026. The strongest statistical defense in print, and the most useful source in the section because it argues against both sides. Its reason: a chiasm's significance depends not only on how improbable the arrangement is (L) but on how many chances the whole work gave it (N), so the quantity that matters is P. Two of the article's conclusions come straight out of it — that Alma 36 is deliberate, and that the Doctrine and Covenants chiasmus argument is worthless. Table 1 is reproduced in the article and re-read column by column in quotes.md.
  • Earl M. Wunderli, "Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm", Dialogue 38:4 (2005). Opened Aug 8, 2026. The best critique, because it attacks the element list rather than the arithmetic. Its reason: Alma 36 is heavily repetitive, so choosing which of several occurrences of a keyword counts as an element is a decision, and Welch's decisions have changed across four publications. Its boundary objection — that Alma 36 and 37 are one chapter in 1830 — is the part no statistical rerun can answer. Used for six quotations and for the nine mid-sentence divisions.
  • The Book of Mormon, 1879 electrotype edition, Internet Archive bookmormonanacc01ofgoog. Opened Aug 8, 2026 through the Internet Archive OCR of the Google scan. Opened specifically to source the claim Wunderli does not make: that the chapter break defining the chiasm belongs to Orson Pratt's division. The title page credits Pratt with the "division into chapters and verses," and the edition opens a chapter 36 at "My son, give ear to my words." The OCR is poor and the corrections applied are listed in quotes.md.
  • John W. Welch's fifteen criteria (1989, revised 1995). Not opened directly. Reported through Wunderli, who states the number, the date, and that Welch used fourteen of them on Alma 36. The article's remark that publishing such criteria is a scholar disciplining his own method rests on that report, not on the criteria themselves.

King James dependence

  • research/ngram_overlap.py and research/kjv_italics.py, written for this article and run Aug 4, 2026. The two original measurements. The n-gram script answers "how many runs of N consecutive words does the Book of Mormon share word for word with a given source, and how much of the book do they cover?" The italics script answers a sharper question: of the English words the 1611 translators admitted they had supplied, how many survive in the Book of Mormon's parallel verses? Both scripts' method sections, caveats, and corpus provenance are quoted in the article's footnotes rather than summarized.
  • Project Gutenberg ebook #17 (Book of Mormon, current LDS edition) and ebook #10 (King James Bible). The two primary corpora. The Book of Mormon text is not the 1830 first edition, which is the single most important limitation on the italics result and is stated in the article three times.
  • eBible.org eng-kjv USFM release. The King James Bible with the translators' supplied words marked in \add … \add* markup. This is what makes the italics test mechanical rather than a matter of eyeballing a printed page. Its accuracy against a 1611 or 1769 printing was not independently audited.
  • Gilbert J. Hunt, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain (New York, 1816), Internet Archive latewarbetweenun00hunt; The First Book of Napoleon (London, 1809), firstbooknapole00gruagoog; Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews, 1823 (viewofhebrews0000etha) and 1825 (viewofhebrewsort00smit); James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Project Gutenberg #940. Used as corpora, not read as books. Each was loaded as the host's own OCR or plain text and normalized to word tokens. No claim in the article depends on reading any of them; the claims depend on counting them. That distinction is worth keeping, because OCR noise degrades a match count and therefore biases the control results against the article's own conclusion rather than toward it.
  • "Matthew 6:13 Greek Texts," Bible Hub. Opened Aug 8, 2026. Used for the Lord's Prayer doxology, which the article treats as the clearest case of the Book of Mormon reproducing a King James reading that modern editors reject. A parallel-text page is a weak substitute for a critical apparatus; it establishes the split between the Byzantine and Alexandrian traditions but names no manuscript. Metzger's Textual Commentary is the source this section should eventually cite.

The nineteenth-century agenda

  • Alexander Campbell, "Delusions," Millennial Harbinger 2 (Feb 7, 1831), reprinted as Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston, 1832). Opened Aug 8, 2026 through the Internet Archive OCR of the 1832 reprint. The single most valuable source in the article. Its reason: Campbell knew which religious arguments were live in western New York because he was conducting several of them, and he compiled his list of controversies from that knowledge and then found them in the book — which is a prediction rather than a retrofit. The OCR is poor and the corrections applied to four passages are listed in quotes.md. The original Millennial Harbinger issue was not opened; no clean transcription of it could be reached on Aug 8, 2026 (solomonspalding.com returned 404 for the expected path and sidneyrigdon.com did not resolve). Locating the periodical original is the most valuable single bibliographic upgrade available to this article.
  • "Anti-Masonic Party," Encyclopædia Britannica, 11th edition (1911). Opened Aug 8, 2026. Used only for the outline and date of the Morgan affair. It replaced an earlier draft sentence that placed the Morgan affair "a few miles from Palmyra"; Morgan was a Freemason of Batavia, which is not a few miles from Palmyra, and the corrected sentence claims only the region and the timing. A general encyclopedia is the weakest source in the article; Charles McCarthy's 1902 study of the Anti-Masonic party, which the entry itself cites, is what should replace it.

Source-book hypotheses

  • Chris and Duane Johnson, "A Comparison of The Book of Mormon and The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain", WordTree Foundation (first published Jan 11, 2014; analysis run October 2013). johnson-2014. Opened Oct 1, 2026, in full. Direction: undercuts, on its own account. They compared the Book of Mormon with more than 100,000 pre-1830 books, called a four-word phrase rare if it occurs in fewer than one book in a thousand, removed biblical matches, and found over 100 rare four-word phrases shared with The Late War, more than 99.999 percent of the other books. Cited for the claim in its authors' words. The article answers that the comparison lacks a genre control, and shows with its own script that The First Book of Napoleon matches more densely per source word at both seven and four words. The earlier draft could not find the study because it looked at wordtree.org.
  • B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, ed. Brigham D. Madsen (University of Illinois Press, 1985). Opened Oct 1, 2026 through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of item studiesofbookofm00bhro; not held in the library. Pages from the scan's page map (leaf minus 40). Direction: undercuts. Roberts's "A Book of Mormon Study" argues that the resemblances to View of the Hebrews are many and that their "cumulative force" is "so serious a menace" (p. 240), and that Joseph Smith had the imagination to write the book (p. 250). His unsent covering letter says the study "does not represent any conclusions of mine" and that faith in the book is "unshakable" (pp. 57–58). Madsen judges that whether Roberts kept his belief "may never be determined" (p. 30). Cited for all four points. The article's verdict is that the parallels show a common stock of ideas and that no one has counted how many any two such books would share.
  • Ethan Smith, View of the Hebrews (1823, 1825). Used as an n-gram corpus only; not read. The article's finding about it is negative and mechanical — that there is no verbal borrowing — and it explicitly declines to answer the thematic argument on that basis.

Early Modern English

  • Royal Skousen, "The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon", BYU Studies Quarterly 57:3 (2018). Opened Aug 8, 2026. The best single statement of the Skousen–Carmack case, and unusually candid: Skousen asks whether the original text is an Early Modern English text and answers no, gives a counterexample against his own thesis in the perfective auxiliary have, and calls the text a "creative translation" and a "cultural translation." Faithful summaries usually omit all of that; the article quotes it.
  • Royal Skousen, ed., The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (Yale University Press, 2009), and the Nature of the Original Language volumes. Not opened. The article reports the 39 archaic word meanings and 25 archaic phrases as Skousen's own count of his own work, which is what the 2018 article states, and does not audit them.
  • Stanford Carmack, "The Implications of Past-Tense Syntax in the Book of Mormon", Interpreter 14 (2015): 119–186; "What Command Syntax Tells Us About Book of Mormon Authorship", Interpreter 13 (2015): 175–217; "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?", Interpreter 28 (2018): 177–232. Links, authorship, volumes and pages confirmed Aug 8, 2026; abstract of the 2018 article read; the statistics in all three not audited. The 2018 abstract is quoted because it is the direct refutation of the common claim that Carmack never ran a genre-matched control — he devoted an article to exactly that corpus. Anyone who wants to attack or defend the Early Modern English thesis has to read all three in full; this article does not, and says so.
  • William L. Davis, "Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language", Dialogue 58:2 (2025). Opened Aug 8, 2026. The strongest answer to Skousen and Carmack, and it comes from inside the tradition. Its reason is documentary rather than statistical: the premise that Joseph Smith could not have met these forms is testable against what working-class households in his region actually owned and read, and Bunyan's The Holy War — in over fifty British editions in the eighteenth century, eight American editions between 1794 and 1818, in Wesley's Christian Library, and on sale in Palmyra and Manchester bookstores — covers the range of periphrastic did that Carmack treats as diagnostic. Davis also derives the "if–and" conditional from King James New Testament templates, which is the single sharpest blow to the strongest claimed Hebraism.
  • Roger Terry, "Archaic Pronouns and Verbs in the Book of Mormon", Dialogue 47:3 (2014). Opened Aug 8, 2026. Included because it is faithful resistance from a different direction: the erratic second-person pronouns imply an imperfect human translator, and Terry doubts that human was Joseph Smith. An earlier draft described Terry as accepting tight control and blaming a fallible translator; the opened text does not support that framing and the article was corrected.
  • James W. Lucas, in the Interpreter (2025). Cut. An earlier draft credited Lucas with pressing the question of who the sixteenth-century translator is supposed to have been. The article could not be located on Aug 8, 2026 — the Interpreter's WordPress REST API and site search both refused programmatic queries, and Mojeek returned nothing — so the attribution was removed and the question is now asked in the article's own voice, where it needs no citation.

Isaiah

  • S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (T. & T. Clark, 1910 printing). driver-1910. Opened Oct 1, 2026 from the library text. Direction: undercuts. Gives three grounds for dating Isaiah 40–66 to the end of the exile: the exile is presupposed and not predicted (pp. 236–237), the literary style (p. 238), and the theological ideas (p. 242). Says the dating does not make the prophecy a prediction after the event (p. 243). Cited as the classic statement of the grounds. A current commentary was not opened; Driver's reasons are the ones still given.

Hebraisms

  • John A. Tvedtnes, "Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey", BYU Studies 11:1 (1970): 50–60. tvedtnes-1970. Opened Oct 1, 2026, in full. Direction: supports, as argued; the article finds the examples are King James English. Argues the English is a nearly literal translation and lists the construct state, the cognate accusative, heavy "and" and "it came to pass." Does not consider the King James Bible as a source of the same constructions. Cited.
  • John A. Tvedtnes, "The Hebrew Background of the Book of Mormon," in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon (Deseret Book and FARMS, 1991), 77–91. Opened Oct 1, 2026 through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of item rediscoveringboo0000unse; not held. Direction: complicates. Illustrates the Hebrew cognate idiom with King James verses ("she vowed a vow"), which shows where an imitator would get it. Cited for that.
  • Royal Skousen, "The Original Language of the Book of Mormon: Upstate New York Dialect, King James English, or Hebrew?", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3:1 (1994): 28–38. skousen-1994. Opened Oct 1, 2026, in full. Direction: supports. Reports at least fourteen "if … and" conditionals in the earliest text, thirteen removed in 1837, seven of them in Helaman 12:13–21 (p. 34), and says the potential Hebraisms "are consistent with the belief, but do not prove" a Hebrew source (p. 38). Cited.
  • The Book of Mormon (Palmyra: E. B. Grandin, 1830). bofm-1830. Opened Oct 1, 2026 in the Joseph Smith Papers transcript and the Internet Archive scan bookofmormonacco1830smit. The primary check on Skousen and Tvedtnes. Pages 440 (Helaman 12), 586 (Moroni 10:4), 200 (Mosiah 21:28) and 546 (Ether 4:1) are cited.
  • Stanford Carmack, "A Look at Some 'Nonstandard' Book of Mormon Grammar", Interpreter 11 (2014): 209–262. carmack-2014. Opened Oct 1, 2026; the passages on Hebrew were read, the whole paper was not audited. Direction: complicates. Assigns constructions others call Hebraisms to Early Modern English and warns against calling Book of Mormon syntax "Hebrew-like" before checking earlier English (p. 235 and note 53). Cited for that.
  • research/hebraism_count.ts, written for this article and run Oct 1, 2026. Counts five constructions in six books. Direction: undercuts. The King James Bible has more cognate pairs per 10,000 words than the Book of Mormon, the noun-chain rates are equal, and "dreamed a dream" stands in The First Book of Napoleon (ch. XVI, v. 14). The Book of Mormon is above the King James rate on "it came to pass," sentence-initial "And" and compound prepositions, which the article reports as fitting a literal translation and an overdone imitation equally. A string search finds no "if … and" conditional in the King James Bible, The Late War or the Napoleon pamphlet, which is reported in the Book of Mormon's favour.
  • William L. Davis 2025 and Royal Skousen 2018, listed under Early Modern English below, are also cited in the Hebraisms section: Davis for the New Testament models of the conditional and for Skousen's own hedges, Skousen for "strictly speaking not a Hebraism."

Names

  • Paul Y. Hoskisson, "Book of Mormon Names", Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992). Opened Oct 1, 2026. Supplies the inventory: 337 proper names, 188 unique to the Book of Mormon. Cited.
  • John A. Tvedtnes, John Gee and Matthew Roper, "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions", Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9:1 (2000): 40–51, 78–79. tvedtnes-2000. Opened Oct 1, 2026, in full. Direction: supports, as argued; the article's test finds the matches are at the chance rate. Lists sixteen names and the inscriptions said to attest them. The article takes its matching rule from this paper's own statements (consonants only, final aleph allowed, any sibilant, part of a name, neighbouring languages, any period). Cited throughout the names section.
  • Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (Bookcraft, 1952). Opened Oct 1, 2026 through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of item lehiindesertworl0000unse; not held. Direction: supports, as argued. Equates Paanchi with Egyptian Paiankh (p. 24) and states that inexact matches are "strong confirmation" (p. 30). Cited for both. The Egyptian claims are left unscored and the article says why.
  • Thomas J. Finley, "Does the Book of Mormon Reflect an Ancient Near Eastern Background?" in The New Mormon Challenge (Zondervan, 2002), from p. 337. Opened Oct 1, 2026 through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of item newmormonchallen0000unse; not held; endnotes not available. Direction: undercuts. Argues that Sariah could be coined from Sarah and Seraiah (p. 358) and that names from Jerusalem about 600 BC should be heavy with the divine name, which the Book of Mormon's are not (p. 358). Cited for both.
  • James Strong's Hebrew dictionary in the Open Scriptures JSON edition. strong-2010. The list of 2,672 Hebrew proper names the base-rate tool searches. Data, not argument.
  • research/name_base_rate.ts, written for this article and run Oct 1, 2026. Direction: undercuts. Of 163 non-biblical Book of Mormon names, 85 match a Hebrew Bible name under the proponents' rule; chance predicts 83.8 ± 4.7. Fifteen of the proponents' sixteen share consonants with a King James name. Against the excavated inscriptions the only matches beyond chance are names built on a King James name's consonants.
  • research/name_base_rate_checks.ts, written when the tool above was independently audited on Oct 1, 2026; output at research/name-base-rate-checks-output.txt. It imports the first tool's functions. Direction: undercuts, with one result that leans the other way. Real Hebrew Bible names, each treated as missing from the list, match at a rate that would give 99.5 ± 5.2 for the 163 names' mix of lengths, against 85 observed, so the test can see real names and the Book of Mormon names sit with the random ones. Leaving out the 36 names found only in Ether changes nothing (64 of 127 against 60 to 65). A tighter consonant rule gives the same result against the Hebrew Bible list (73 against 69 to 74). Against the inscriptions the names that share a King James name's consonants match more often than random names that share them (30 against 24.3 ± 3.9; under the tighter rule 23 against 16.3 ± 3.3), which is the one result leaning toward the Latter-day Saint side; the names with no King James twin match once in 77, and random names with no twin also match about once (the first tool's "about three" used rates that were not split the same way). Distinct names ending in the divine name: Book of Mormon 6.6 to 7.9 percent, Judah's excavated names 26.7 percent. Cited.
  • Mitka R. Golub, Onomasticon.net: Personal Names from the Iron II Southern Levant, data file of April 2025. golub-2025. Opened Oct 1, 2026. 1,081 name records from excavated artifacts, 524 distinct names; market pieces excluded. Data, not argument. The base-rate tool searches it: 31 of the 163 names match exactly, 30 of them names whose consonants are in a King James name; of the 77 names with no King James twin, one matches, against about one expected by chance for random names that also have no twin. Direction of that result: undercuts. Cited.
  • Warren P. Aston, "Newly Found Altars from Nahom" (2001), aston-2001. Considered and not used here. Nahom is treated in the archaeology article, which cites it.
  • Jeffrey R. Chadwick on Sariah (1993) and on the seal of Mulek (2003), and Paul Y. Hoskisson on Alma (1998), all in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies. Not opened. Their findings are reported as Tvedtnes, Gee and Roper summarize them, which is enough for a test of the matching rule. Yigael Yadin's publication of the Nahal Hever document and the Elephantine papyri themselves were not opened either.

Narrative complexity

  • Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (Oxford University Press, 2010). Opened Oct 1, 2026 through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of item understandingboo0000hard, which cannot be borrowed; not held; endnotes not available. Pages from the scan's page map (leaf minus 26), roman pages from the contents and running heads. Direction: supports careful design; complicates any inference to antiquity, on Hardy's own statements. Argues for three distinct narrators, a nearly clean chronology, embedded documents and closed flashbacks (pp. 6, 7, 13, 84, 91, 104, 105), and says his observations would hold for a novel and that he leaves historicity to others (pp. xviii, 26, 28, 121). Cited at thirteen places.
  • Brent Lee Metcalfe, "The Priority of Mosiah," in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon (Signature Books, 1993), from p. 395. Opened Oct 1, 2026 from the Internet Archive text of item NewApproachesToTheBookOfMormon. Direction: undercuts. Shows that "therefore" gives way to "wherefore" in the order of dictation, with the switch inside Ether (pp. 409, 412). Cited. The rest of the volume was not read.
  • Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part Three. skousen-2014d. Opened Oct 1, 2026; the entry on Mosiah 21:28 was read (p. 1418). Direction: complicates. Confirms that the 1830 text reads "king Benjamin" where Benjamin is already dead and that 1837 changed it, and offers two faithful explanations. Cited. Part Two (skousen-2014e) is in the library and was considered and not used: it stops at Mosiah 16.
  • research/word_drift.ts, written for this article and run Oct 1, 2026. Counts "therefore," "wherefore" and "Messiah" by part in dictation order. Confirms Metcalfe on the current text and confirms the pattern of Hardy's count of "Messiah" (the tool finds 29 in 1 and 2 Nephi where Hardy gives 23 for Nephi's writings). A second table, added when the article was verified, sets the same narrator at two stages of dictation: Words of Mormon, narrated by Mormon and dictated last, has wherefore 4 and therefore 0, against 593 and 7 in Mormon's early-dictated text.

Stylometry

All seven papers were opened on Oct 1, 2026.

  • Wayne A. Larsen, Alvin C. Rencher and Tim Layton, "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints", BYU Studies 20:3 (1980): 225–251. larsen-1980. Read in full by OCR of the page images. Direction: supports, as argued. Word-rate tests on 251 blocks assigned to 24 speakers; odds against one author "less than 1 in 100 billion," with the authors' own caution; notes an unexplained "time trend" (p. 234). Cited. The article observes that the word list includes "therefore," which tracks the order of dictation.
  • John L. Hilton, "On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship", BYU Studies 30:3 (1990): 89–108. hilton-1990. Read in full. Direction: supports, as argued. Morton's word-pattern ratios on six 5,000-word texts; Nephi and Alma differ and neither matches Smith, Cowdery or Spaulding (pp. 99, 101). Cited.
  • David I. Holmes, "A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 155:1 (1992): 91–120. Read through the Internet Archive's search-inside text of the microfilm issue sim_journal-of-the-royal-statistical-society-series-a_1992_155_1; not held; tables and figures not seen. No JSTOR read was used. Direction: undercuts. Vocabulary richness finds no difference between the prophets (p. 117) and Holmes concludes for Joseph Smith's "prophetic voice" (p. 118). Cited, with the limit that the measure is weak.
  • Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten and Craig S. Criddle, "Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 23:4 (2008): 465–491. jockers-2008 (authors' preprint, and Dale Broadhurst's transcript of the published text with page breaks). Read in full. Direction: undercuts, as argued; the article retires its attribution. Closed set of seven candidates without Smith; first choices Rigdon 93, Isaiah and Malachi 63, Spalding 52 (p. 473). Cited.
  • G. Bruce Schaalje, Paul J. Fields, Matthew Roper and Gregory L. Snow, "Extended nearest shrunken centroid classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 26:1 (2011): 71–88. schaalje-2011. Read in full from the journal PDF posted by an author. Direction: complicates. Shows the closed-set method naming Rigdon for 28 of 51 Hamilton essays (p. 75); open-set rerun gives 175 of 239 chapters (73.2%) to unobserved authors (p. 83); states that the archaic language has not been adjusted for (p. 84). Cited.
  • Paul J. Fields, G. Bruce Schaalje and Matthew Roper, "Examining a Misapplication of Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification", Mormon Studies Review 23:1 (2011): 87–111. fields-2011. Read in full, Aug 8 and Oct 1, 2026. A review by three of the four authors of the paper above. Supplies the 93 percent figure with control authors removed (p. 107), the criticism of Holmes's measure (p. 96) and the list of Joseph Smith's letters. Cited for what can be checked against the journal articles.
  • Matthew L. Jockers, "Testing Authorship in the Personal Writings of Joseph Smith Using NSC Classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 28:3 (2013): 371–381. jockers-2013 (author's manuscript; locators are manuscript pages). Read in full. Direction: complicates. Smith's own-hand documents are recognised as his only 64 percent of the time; concludes that leaving Smith out of the 2008 study was justified. Cited.
  • G. Bruce Schaalje, John L. Hilton and John B. Archer, "Comparative Power of Three Author-Attribution Techniques," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 6:1 (1997). Not opened. Its 23 percent figure for vocabulary richness is reported through Fields, Schaalje and Roper, and the footnote says so.
  • D. James Croft, "Book of Mormon 'Wordprints' Reexamined," Sunstone (1981). Not opened. Known from Fields, Schaalje and Roper. Not cited.

Not obtained, and what each would settle

Of what the earlier draft listed here, Hardy, Roberts, the Johnsons' study, Tvedtnes, the 1830 edition and a statement of the grounds for dating Isaiah 40–66 have since been read.  What remains:

  • A catalogue of inscribed names that includes the market seals and bullae. The name test runs against the Hebrew Bible's names and against Golub's catalogue of excavated artifacts, which leaves out pieces from the antiquities market. The proponents use those pieces. The published corpora that include them (Avigad and Sass, Davies) are print books and were not found in machine-readable form.
  • The primary publications behind the best-known name claims. Yadin on the Nahal Hever document, the Elephantine papyri, and the Marib altar reports were not opened here. The names are reported as Tvedtnes, Gee and Roper give them, and the altars are treated in the archaeology article.
  • Skousen's Grammatical Variation and Nature of the Original Language volumes. Quoted only as Davis quotes them. They would give the full list of the fourteen conditionals and of the wider extra-"and" pattern. Only the textual-variants volumes of the critical text were found online, at the Interpreter Foundation.
  • The endnotes of Hardy 2010 and Finley 2002, and the tables and figures of Holmes 1992. The Internet Archive search-inside route returns running text only. A borrowed or bought copy would supply them.
  • A current Isaiah commentary. Driver 1910 states the grounds; a recent commentary would show they are still the ones in use.
  • The Millennial Harbinger original of February 7, 1831. Would replace a poor OCR of an 1832 reprint with the periodical text on the article's single most important source.
  • A large corpus of dictated or extemporaneous American English of the 1820s. Would test whether the "if … and" restart is a habit of speech. None was looked for in this session.