Only quotations checked against an opened page, scan, or PDF belong here. Every entry in the first part was read on August 8, 2026 from the source named, and every entry under "Additions of October 1, 2026" was read on that date. The article's footnotes carry the same wording and locator.
Spelling, capitalization, and punctuation are the source's own. Where a source was read from an OCR extraction of a page scan, obvious scanning corruption has been corrected against the surrounding text, and no reading was accepted where the scan was unclear; those entries are marked OCR and the raw OCR string is given so a reader can see exactly what was corrected.
Verification method: each page was fetched with bin/pagetext.py, which prints readable page text verbatim rather than summarizing it, and cached under /home/eric/scratch/mormon-sources/cache/. Each quotation below was then matched against the cached text by an exact string comparison after whitespace and quotation-mark normalization. Nothing here was transcribed from memory.
John W. Welch, "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies 10:1 (1969)
Read at https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/chiasmus-in-the-book-of-mormon/.
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 1969 | "although some chiasms appear in Greek, Latin, and English, the form was originally Hebrew and dates at least to the eighth and tenth centuries B.C. in Isaiah and in the Psalms" |
| 1969 | "If chiasmus can be convincingly identified in the Book of Mormon, then specific Hebraisms will testify of its origin, because there exists no chance that Joseph Smith could have learned of this style through academic channels. No one in America, let alone in western New York, fully understood chiasmus in 1829." |
| 1969 | "The possibility of Joseph Smith's noticing the form accidentally is even more remote, since most biblical passages containing inverted word orders have been rearranged into natural word orders in the King James translation." |
| 1969 | "If the Book of Mormon then is found to contain true chiasmal forms, should it not be asserted without further qualification that the book is a product of ancient Hebrew culture?" |
Boyd F. Edwards and W. Farrell Edwards, "Does Chiasmus Appear in the Book of Mormon by Chance?", BYU Studies 43:2 (2004)
Read at https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/does-chiasmus-appear-in-the-book-of-mormon-by-chance/.
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2004 | "the longer a monkey sits at a typewriter, the greater the likelihood that a sonnet will emerge" |
| 2004 | "These results rule out, with 99.98 percent certainty, the claim that Alma 36:1–30 is simply an arrangement of words that happen to fall into chiastic order by chance." |
| 2004 | "Our results do not prove that the Book of Mormon is a translation of an ancient document, but they do establish that chiastic passages in the Book of Mormon likely appeared by design, that is, by the deliberate application of the chiastic form by the author(s) of these passages." |
| 2004 | "Our results are consistent with the idea that chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants and the book of Abraham are simply patterns of words that happen to fall into chiastic order by chance, patterns that are recognized only after the fact through the diligence of the analyst." |
| 2004 | "Our results do not rule out the possibility that Joseph Smith knew about the chiastic style when he translated the Book of Mormon but do rule out the use of chiasms in the Doctrine and Covenants and the book of Abraham as possible evidence of that knowledge." |
| 2004 | On the computer-manual example, which the paper credits to a critic rather than devising itself: "An anonymous author similarly suggests that chiasms in the Book of Mormon are the 'result of the incredible amount of repetition contained therein, and are well within the bounds of probability.' … The author illustrates this claim with a four-element 'chiasm' found in the introduction to a computer manual, the INFORMIX-OnLine Database Administrator's Guide. Our analysis of the same text proffers a nine-element chiastic structure" |
Table 1, "Likelihoods P that Chiasms in Various Works Could Have Appeared by Chance," read verbatim. Its columns are Work, Chiasm, Example, n, L, N, M, P; the "Example" column is a cross-reference number, not a count, and the article's table drops it. The rows the article reproduces:
| Row as printed | n | L | N | P |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Book of Abraham 3:26–28 | 3 | 0.067 | 54 | 0.98 |
| 4. Doctrine and Cov. 88:34–39 | 5 | 0.0011 | 686 | 0.52 |
| 5. Book of Mormon four strongest | 5 | 0.0011 | 956 | 0.020 |
| 6. Pentateuch Lev. 24:13–23 | 7 | 0.0000074 | 342 | 0.0025 |
| 7. Book of Mormon Alma 36:1–30 | 8 | 0.00000049 | 359 | 0.00018 |
Row 3 of the same table is the INFORMIX guide, scored at n = 9, L = 0.66, N = 1, P = 0.66.
Earl M. Wunderli, "Critique of Alma 36 as an Extended Chiasm," Dialogue 38:4 (2005)
Read at https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/critique-of-alma-36-as-an-extended-chiasm/.
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2005 | "My argument is that he has imposed chiasmus on the Book of Mormon where none was intended." |
| 2005 | "His rendering of it has changed each time he has written about it, and his latest (1991) version follows" |
| 2005 | "One has only to highlight these thirty-four elements in Alma 36 to see how much text—more than 80 per cent of it—Welch has ignored in constructing his chiasm." |
| 2005 | On boundaries: "Welch divides sentences in half between sections A and B; C and D; the second A and E; G and H; J and K; H' and G'; G' and F'; E' and D'; and D' and C" — nine divisions, the last mangled in the source text as "C\" |
| 2005 | "This is clearly an unnatural mid-sentence division but was apparently done to keep born of God out of F', where it would weaken the chiasm under another of Welch's criteria called 'mavericks.'" |
| 2005 | "The two chapters go together; indeed, they are a single chapter (XVII) in the first edition of the Book of Mormon." |
| 2005 | "The existence of extended chiasmus in the Book of Mormon seems far from proved by Alma 36. While the inverted parallelism developed by Welch is impressive on first reading, on closer analysis it is Welch's creativity that is most notable." |
| 2005 | On the Edwards test's inputs: the physicists use the four Welch criteria that can be "quantified numerically," their judgments rest "only on the order of words and ideas," and they "disregard the overall integrity and literary merit of chiasms" |
Wunderli also states that Welch defended Alma 36 "using fourteen of a set of fifteen criteria he proposed in 1989 for identifying and evaluating the presence of chiasmus," republished in 1995 "with slight modifications." Wunderli does not name Orson Pratt or the year 1879 anywhere; the article's attribution of the modern chapter break to Pratt's 1879 edition is sourced separately.
Alexander Campbell, "Delusions," Millennial Harbinger 2 (Feb 7, 1831), reprinted as Delusions: An Analysis of the Book of Mormon (Boston, 1832)
Read from the Internet Archive scan text of the 1832 Boston reprint, https://archive.org/details/delusionsanalysi00camp. All four passages below fall on page 13 of the reprint, inside Campbell's numbered summary of internal evidence. OCR.
| Date | Page | Words |
|---|---|---|
| Feb 7, 1831 | 13 | "This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N. York for the last ten years. He decides all the great controversies—infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting, penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the question of freemasonry, republican government, and the rights of man." |
| Feb 7, 1831 | 13 | "How easy to prophecy of the past or of the present time!" |
| Feb 7, 1831 | 13 | "He represents the christian institution as practised among his Israelites before Jesus was born. And his Jews are called christians while keeping the law of Moses, the holy sabbath, and worshipping in their temple at their altars, and by their high priests." |
| Feb 7, 1831 | 13 | "Paul says these things were secrets and unknown until his time, but Smith makes Nephi say the same things 600 years before Paul was converted!" |
OCR corrections applied, with the raw scan reading first and the corrected reading second. Every one is an unambiguous character-recognition failure, and none changes the sense: book of Morm">n → "book of Mormon"; the fall of n:an → "the fall of man"; republi- can govermnent. → "republican government,"; Neplii → "Nephi"; GOO years → "600 years"; Paid was converted → "Paul was converted"; tlie holy sabbath → "the holy sabbath"; high priesis → "high priests"; controversies- → "controversies—". The scan prints two exclamation marks after "present time"; the article prints one. The scan hyphenates "republi- can" across a line break.
"Book of Mormon Translation," Gospel Topics Essays (2016)
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2016 | "almost all of the present Book of Mormon text was translated during a three-month period between April and June" |
| 2016 | "about 28 percent" — of the original manuscript, the portion that survives |
| 2016 | Emma Smith, quoted in the essay: "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from." |
| 2016 | "some grammatical constructions that are more characteristic of Near Eastern languages than English appear in the original manuscript, suggesting that the base language of the translation was not English" |
| 2016 | Joseph Smith's own standing answer, quoted in the essay: "by the gift and power of God" |
Royal Skousen, "The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies Quarterly 57:3 (2018)
Read at https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-language-of-the-original-text-of-the-book-of-mormon/.
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2018 | "In The Nature of the Original Language (NOL), I list 39 words with archaic meanings and 25 archaic phrases, for a total of 64 language items, that disappeared from English before the mid-1700s and do not occur in the King James Bible." |
| 2018 | "Stanford Carmack has found that the Book of Mormon syntax matches best what we find in English from the second half of the 1500s, but it does not match the syntax of the 1611 King James Bible nor the pseudo-biblical texts that were popular during the late 1700s and early 1800s, such as Richard Snowden's 1793 The American Revolution and Gilbert Hunt's 1816 The Late War." |
| 2018 | "Yet this syntax does not show up in Joseph Smith's own writing, including his 1832 History written only three years after he finished translating the Book of Mormon." |
| 2018 | Question posed and answered by Skousen himself: "Is the original Book of Mormon text an Early Modern English text?" — "The answer is no." |
| 2018 | "In the Book of Mormon, the use of the perfective auxiliary have is considerably more frequent than the archaic perfective auxiliary be for verbs of motion and change; this syntax appears to date from the late 1700s, nearer to Joseph Smith's time, than from the Early Modern English period, which definitely favored the perfective be (as in 'he is risen')." |
| 2018 | "All of this cultural translation linking the text to Early Modern English argues that Joseph Smith was not the author of the English translation." |
| 2018 | Skousen's own terms for the text: a "creative translation" and a "cultural translation" |
William L. Davis, "Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language: The Presence of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon," Dialogue 58:2 (2025)
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2025 | "While Skousen and Carmack have enlisted a complex and multifaceted array of evidence in favor of their position, their conclusions nevertheless rest upon a set of foundational assumptions concerning the types of language features (vocabulary, grammar, expressions, etc.) that Joseph allegedly could—or, more specifically, could not—have known. This essay, however, argues that such conclusions should be regarded with caution." |
| 2025 | "Nevertheless, in spite of these technical variations, the Book of Mormon formulations openly display their direct derivation and dependence upon the English renditions of the KJV New Testament models." |
| 2025 | "With the Book of Mormon forms ultimately deriving from adaptations of New Testament lexico-syntactic templates, any linguistic artifacts from the translation process would necessarily come from Greek (the language underlying the New Testament), rather than Hebrew, presenting an admittedly awkward resolution for the theory of 'tight control.'" |
| 2025 | On the availability of Bunyan: "In the eighteenth century, the work appeared in over fifty editions in Britain." |
| 2025 | "Between 1794 and 1818 alone, eight American editions and reprints appeared in several centers of publication: New York (1794, 1805), Portsmouth, New Hampshire (1794), Philadelphia (1803, 1818), Baltimore (1812), Alban…" — the list continues to Boston (1817) |
| 2025 | "John Wesley included an edited version of The Holy War in his multivolume Christian Library, an educational resource for Methodist exhorters and preachers, who often had little or no formal education." |
| 2025 | "titles such as The Holy War, Pilgrim's Progress, Grace Abounding, along with biographies of John Bunyan, were readily available in the bookstores near the Smith family residences in Palmyra and Manchester, New York" |
Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?", Interpreter 28 (2018): 177–232
Read at https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text/. Quoted here because it is the direct answer to the objection that Carmack never ran a genre-matched control.
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2018 | "Pseudo-biblical writings can be considered a control group in relation to the linguistic form and structure that Joseph Smith might have produced had he been attempting to mimic biblical style in 1829." |
| 2018 | "Hence, large deviations from both biblical and pseudo biblical patterns that approach attested archaic usage could support the position that Joseph was not its author or English-language translator." |
Roger Terry, "Archaic Pronouns and Verbs in the Book of Mormon," Dialogue 47:3 (2014)
| Date | Words |
|---|---|
| 2014 | "the text shifts back and forth randomly between the singular (thou and its variants) and the plural (ye and its siblings) in contexts where the singular form is required" |
| 2014 | "this leaves us with only one other possibility: it is a human translation. And it shows all the signs of being just that. Someone wrestled with the words and phrases and did so very imperfectly. But who was the human translator? Joseph? I doubt this." |
The Book of Mormon, 1879 electrotype edition — Orson Pratt's chapter and verse division
Read from the Internet Archive OCR of the Google scan, item bookmormonanacc01ofgoog, https://archive.org/details/bookmormonanacc01ofgoog. OCR.
| Locator | Words |
|---|---|
| Title page | "TRANSLATED BY JOSEPH SMITH, JUN. DIVISION INTO CHAPTERS AND VERSES, WITH REFERENCES, BY ORSON PRATT, SEN. … ELECTROTYPE EDITION. PRINTED AND PUBLISHED BY WILLIAM BUDGE, 42, ISLINGTON. … 1879." |
| Book of Alma, running head and chapter opening | "CHAP. XXXVI.] BOOK OF ALMA … The Commandments of Alma to his son Helaman, CHAPTER 36. 1. My son, give ear to my words" |
OCR corrections applied. Title page raw: DIVISION INTO OHAPTBRS AND YERSEg, WITH EBJ BY ORSON PRATT, Sen. and ELEOTBOTYFE EDITtOH. IPBIHTED ANB PUBLISHED BT WILLIAM BUDGE, 42, ISLnfOTOir. Running head raw: CHAP. XXXYI.] BOOK OF ALICA. The truncated WITH EBJ is read as "WITH REFERENCES" on the strength of the surviving letters and the edition's well-known reference apparatus; that expansion is the one reading here that is inferred rather than legible, and the article does not rest any claim on it.
This is the primary evidence that the chapter break separating Alma 36 from Alma 37 — the break that defines Welch's chiasm — belongs to Orson Pratt's 1879 division, not to the 1830 text. Wunderli supplies the other half: Alma 36 and 37 "are a single chapter (XVII) in the first edition."
3 Nephi 13:13 and the Lord's Prayer doxology
Book of Mormon text read at https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/scriptures/bofm/3-ne/13?lang=eng.
| Locator | Words |
|---|---|
| 3 Nephi 13:13 | "For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, forever. Amen." |
The Greek witnesses were read at https://biblehub.com/texts/matthew/6-13.htm, which prints Matthew 6:13 in eight editions side by side. The doxology is absent from the SBL Greek New Testament (2010), Nestle (1904), Westcott and Hort (1881), and Tischendorf (8th edition). It is present in the Robinson–Pierpont Byzantine Majority Text (2005), the Greek Orthodox Church text (1904), Scrivener's Textus Receptus (1894), and Stephanus' Textus Receptus (1550) — the tradition the King James translators worked from. The Byzantine wording is "Ὅτι σοῦ ἐστιν ἡ βασιλεία καὶ ἡ δύναμις καὶ ἡ δόξα εἰς τοὺς αἰῶνας. Ἀμήν."
Additions of October 1, 2026
The sections on Hebraisms, names, narrative complexity and stylometry, and the passages on Isaiah, B. H. Roberts and the Johnsons' study, were written on October 1, 2026. Every quotation in them was copied from the source text while it was open. The entries below repeat each claim footnote of the article word for word, so the ledger and the footnotes cannot disagree. The first line under each heading is the article's source footnote, which records how the source was read and how its pages were fixed.
Verification. After the sections were written, a script (/home/eric/scratch/book-of-mormon-authorship/tools/verify_quotes.ts) took every quoted span of four or more words from these footnotes and looked for it in the saved text of its source, comparing letters and digits only so that line-break hyphens and OCR spacing do not matter. The script was calibrated first: a true quotation from Hardy passed and the same sentence with one word changed failed. Of 199 quoted pieces, 189 were found by the script. The other ten were checked by eye and are sound: three are interrupted in the source text by a page break or a page footnote (Larsen pp. 232–233, Schaalje pp. 83–84, the Jockers abstract in the preprint); three sit in two-column pages of Fields, Schaalje and Roper that the text extraction interleaves, and were read from cropped columns; two are OCR misreadings in the scan (Driver p. 243, where "to" is garbled, and the 1830 scan's "Limlii" for Limhi, confirmed in the Joseph Smith Papers transcript); one is the OCR's "ef al." for "et al." in Holmes; and one is a figure caption.
OCR. Five books and one journal issue were read through the Internet Archive's search-inside text, which is OCR: Hardy, Roberts, Tvedtnes 1991, Finley, Nibley and the issue carrying Holmes. In quotations from them, words split by a line-break hyphen are closed up, note numbers are dropped, and nothing else is changed. Larsen 1980 was read from this project's own OCR of the page images.
Independent verification. A second agent that did not write these sections re-checked every claim footnote below on October 1, 2026 against the source bytes: the library copies, fresh downloads of the web pages, a fresh OCR of the Larsen and Tvedtnes page images, and new search-inside queries for the six scanned items with the leaf-to-page offsets derived again. Its checker was calibrated the same way (a true phrase passed, two altered ones failed). All quotations were confirmed word for word. Five locators or counts were corrected and the rows below carry the corrected text: tvedtnes-1970:a (the parenthesis runs from page 50 to page 51), tvedtnes-1970:c (all on page 57, not 58), davis-2025:i (Skousen's Grammatical Variation 1:362 for the lead quotation), jockers-2013:a (manuscript page 12 only) and bofm-1830:e (1,352 occurrences of "it came to pass" in the 1830 OCR). One row was added, tvedtnes-2000:i. Nothing was quarantined.
John A. Tvedtnes, "Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey," BYU Studies 11:1 (1970)
Tvedtnes, John A. "Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey." BYU Studies 11:1. 1970. Pages 50–60. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 from the journal's web text and its page-image PDF. The wording is the web text's; the pages were fixed from the PDF, whose first and last pages carry the printed numbers 50 and 60. The journal's author note describes Tvedtnes as "a teaching assistant in Hebrew at the University of Utah" at the time.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
tvedtnes-1970:a |
Page 50: "the Book of Mormon, in its English form as provided by Joseph Smith, is in many respects a nearly literal translation. Thus, many of the expressions found therein do not properly belong to the English language, but rather to the language from which the book was translated." And, in a parenthesis that begins at the foot of page 50 and ends on page 51: "In view of the fact that Joseph Smith did not know Hebrew in those early years, this is good evidence for the authenticity of the translation." |
tvedtnes-1970:b |
Page 55, under the heading "Construct State": "In Hebrew, we find such expressions as these, extracted from numerous verses in the Book of Mormon: altar of stones; state of probation; words of plainness; land of promise; plates of brass (gold)." The list is set as separate lines in the original. |
tvedtnes-1970:c |
Page 57: "There exists in the Semitic languages a construction called the 'cognate accusative.' It consists of a verb immediately followed by a noun derived from the same root, and is often used for emphasis." The examples follow, with Jacob 3:3 and Mosiah 29:43. Lower on the same page: "Perhaps the most well-known cognate accusative in the Book of Mormon is found in Lehi's conversation with his son Nephi: 'Behold I have dreamed a dream, in the which (i.e., "in it") . . .' (1 Nephi 3:2)." |
tvedtnes-1970:d |
Page 53: "Hebrew uses the conjunction 'and' (w) much more frequently than English. It is frequently used at the beginning of a sentence, even when there is no reason for linking that sentence up with the preceding sentence". |
tvedtnes-1970:e |
Page 54: "The Hebrew word hāyāh ('it was, it became'; also 'he was, became') is our ever-present 'it came to pass.' With the preceding conjunction, by a process known as waw conversive … it becomes wāyehiy ('and it was')." |
John A. Tvedtnes, "The Hebrew Background of the Book of Mormon," in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon (1991)
Tvedtnes, John A. "The Hebrew Background of the Book of Mormon." In Rediscovering the Book of Mormon, edited by John L. Sorenson and Melvin J. Thorne. Deseret Book and the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies. 1991. Pages 77–91. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of Internet Archive item rediscoveringboo0000unse, a scanned copy that is not stored in this project's library. Pages come from the scan's own page map (leaf 89 is page 77 and leaf 103 is page 91, the first and last pages of the chapter). The scan is OCR, and line-break hyphens were closed up.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
tvedtnes-1991:a |
Page 80: "In Hebrew, a verb is sometimes followed by a noun that is a cognate, such as 'wrote upon it a writing' (Exodus 39:30) and 'she vowed a vow' (1 Samuel 1:11)." The same page adds: "Even in translation from the Hebrew, the King James Bible sometimes avoids using cognates." |
Royal Skousen, "The Original Language of the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 3:1 (1994)
Skousen, Royal. "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. Pages 28–38. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026. The PDF's running page numbers were used for the locators.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
skousen-1994:a |
Page 34: "In the original text of the Book of Mormon, there were at least fourteen occurrences of this non-English expression. One occurrence was accidentally removed in 1 Nephi 17:50 as Oliver Cowdery was producing the printer's manuscript". Then: "The remaining thirteen occurrences were all removed by Joseph Smith in his editing for the second edition, including this one from the famous passage in Moroni 10:4". Then: "This use of and is not due to scribal error, especially since this if-and expression occurs seven times in one brief passage, Helaman 12:13–21". The seven are printed on pages 34–35 at verses 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20 and 21. |
skousen-1994:b |
Page 38: "Further, the potential Hebraisms found in the original text are consistent with the belief, but do not prove, that the source text is related to the language of the Hebrew Bible." The sentence before it claims more: the original text "apparently contains expressions that are not characteristic of English at any place or time, in particular neither Joseph Smith's upstate New York dialect nor the King James Bible." |
The Book of Mormon, first edition (Palmyra, 1830)
The Book of Mormon: An Account Written by the Hand of Mormon, upon Plates Taken from the Plates of Nephi. Palmyra, New York: E. B. Grandin. 1830. Read on Oct 1, 2026 in the Joseph Smith Papers transcript and checked against the OCR of the University of Pittsburgh copy, Internet Archive item bookofmormonacco1830smit. The Joseph Smith Papers page address runs six ahead of the printed page (address 446 is printed page 440). The printed page was confirmed from the scan's running heads.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
bofm-1830:a |
Page 440, now Helaman 12:13–21: "yea, and if he saith unto the earth, Move, and it is moved; yea, if he saith unto the earth, Thou shalt go back, that it lengthen out the day for many hours, and it is done". The other five on the same page: "if he saith unto the waters of the great deep, Be thou dried up, and it is done"; "if he saith unto this mountain, Be thou raised up, and come over and fall upon that city, that it be buried up, and behold it is done"; "if the Lord shall say, Be thou accursed, that no man shall find thee from this time henceforth and forever, and behold, no man getteth it henceforth and forever"; "if the Lord shall say unto a man, Because of thine iniquities thou shalt be accursed forever, and it shall be done"; "if the Lord shall say, Because of thine iniquities, thou shalt be cut off from my presence, and he will cause that it shall be so." |
bofm-1830:b |
Page 586, now Moroni 10:4: "and if ye shall ask with a sincere heart, with real intent, having faith in Christ, and he will manifest the truth of it unto you, by the power of the Holy Ghost". |
bofm-1830:c |
Page 200, now Mosiah 21:28: "And now Limhi was again filled with joy, on learning from the mouth of Ammon that king Benjamin had a gift from God, whereby he could interpret such engravings". |
bofm-1830:d |
Page 546, now Ether 4:1: "and for this cause did king Benjamin keep them, that they should not come unto the world until after Christ should shew himself unto his people." |
bofm-1830:e |
Found by searching the OCR text of the 1830 scan for each phrase; the pages were not pinned one by one. Occurrences in the 1830 OCR: "dreamed a dream" 2; "cursed with a sore cursing" 2; "judge righteous judgments" 1; "plates of brass" 26; "altar of stones" 1; "land of promise" 17. The phrase "it came to pass" is found 1,352 times in the 1830 OCR, which is a floor, since OCR misreads hide some instances; the current text has 1,353. |
The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth (London, 1809)
"Eliakim the Scribe" (pseudonym). The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme. 1809. The Internet Archive catalogues the scan under Modeste Gruau. Read from the scan's OCR, the same file used as a control corpus above.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
napoleon-1809:a |
Chapter XVI, verses 13–14, page 103: "Now it so happened, that the bear was lulled asleep by the soft fawnings of the monkey. And in his sleep he dreamed a dream, and behold the dream was, that the monkey had put out one of his eyes". |
Stanford Carmack, "A Look at Some 'Nonstandard' Book of Mormon Grammar," Interpreter 11 (2014)
Carmack, Stanford. "A Look at Some 'Nonstandard' Book of Mormon Grammar." Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 11. 2014. Pages 209–262. Read on Oct 1, 2026 from the journal's web text, which marks the printed pages.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
carmack-2014:a |
Page 235: "Consequently, such syntax constitutes one more piece of evidence that BofM language is not a derivative of KJV language, either poor or otherwise. Hearts delighteth and flames ascendeth are not grammatical flaws (or even syntactic calques of a base Hebrew text), but EModE syntax." Note 53, attached to that sentence: "That being the case, researchers need to be cautious and resist the temptation to analyze BofM syntax as non-English Hebrew-like language or instances of nonstandard use before analyzing past English usage." |
Paul Y. Hoskisson, "Book of Mormon Names," Encyclopedia of Mormonism (1992)
Hoskisson, Paul Y. "Book of Mormon Names." Encyclopedia of Mormonism. Macmillan. 1992. Read on Oct 1, 2026 from the Brigham Young University online edition, which carries no page numbers.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
hoskisson-1992:a |
Opening paragraph: "The Book of Mormon contains 337 proper names and 21 gentilics (or analogous forms) based on proper names. … Of these 337 proper names, 188 are unique to the Book of Mormon, while 149 are common to the Book of Mormon and the Bible." |
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)
Tvedtnes, John A.; Gee, John; and Roper, Matthew. "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions." Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9:1. 2000. Pages 40–51, 78–79. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026. The pages are the PDF's printed footers. The PDF sets Hebrew letters in a transliteration font that does not survive copying, so consonant spellings are given here in ordinary transliteration.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
tvedtnes-2000:a |
Abstract, on the repository's cover page: "The discovery of these Hebrew names in ancient inscriptions provides remarkable evidence for the authenticity of the Book of Mormon and provides clear refutation of those critics who would place its origin in nineteenth-century America. This article explores several Book of Mormon proper names that are attested from Hebrew inscriptions. Names included are Sariah, Alma, Abish, Aha, Ammonihah, Chemish, Hagoth, Himni, Isabel, Jarom, Josh, Luram, Mathoni, Mathonihah, Muloki, and Sam—none of which appear in English Bibles." |
tvedtnes-2000:b |
Page 42: "Paul Hoskisson, following up on previous notes from Hugh Nibley, showed that the name Alma appears on a Jewish document of the early second century a.d., also found in Israel. Terrence Szink provided evidence that the name Alma is even older, being attested on clay tablets found at the northwestern Syrian site of Ebla and dating to the second half of the third millennium b.c." Page 43, on the spelling: "From Hebrew phonetic rules, the most likely pronunciation was Alma, which is how its discoverer, Yigael Yadin, rendered it in English." Page 50 gives the find-spot: "a document found in Nahal Hever in 1961". |
tvedtnes-2000:c |
Page 42: "Jeffrey Chadwick demonstrated that Sariah, known in the Book of Mormon as the name of Lehi's wife, appears on one of the papyri written by members of a Jewish community in Elephantine, Egypt, in the fifth century b.c." Page 43: "Previous to its discovery as a woman's name at Elephantine, Sariah was known from the Bible as a male name, transliterated Seraiah in English, though spelled the same in Hebrew, which, as previously mentioned, was originally written without vowels." |
tvedtnes-2000:d |
Page 51: "Mulek is hypocoristic for Hebrew Mlkyh(w) (KJV Melchiah and Malchiah) … Indeed, it has been suggested that one of the men bearing this name is the Mulek of the Book of Mormon. He is called 'Malchiah the son of Hammelech,' which means 'Malchiah, son of the king' (see Jeremiah 38:6)." |
tvedtnes-2000:e |
Page 47, on Himni: "Because the seal inscriptions do not have vowels, we cannot know precisely how the name is to be read. The Bible knows of a non-Israelite Haman from the time of Esther, and Heman was a noted poet and musician in the time of David and Solomon." |
tvedtnes-2000:f |
The parts of the rule, each from the entry named. Final aleph, page 46, on Abish: "The addition of the Hebrew letter aleph … to the end of the name is known from other Hebrew hypocoristic names, suggesting that the name on the seal may be hypocoristic." Sibilants, page 51, on Sam: "While others have read this name as Shem, in paleoHebrew there is no distinction in writing between" the two letters. Part of a name, page 49: Luram "is reflected in the second element of the name" Adan-Luram, "known from a seal of ca. 720 b.c. found during excavations at Hama (Hamath) in Syria." Other languages, page 47: "The name Hagoth is attested in the form" ḥgt "on an Ammonite seal"; page 49: the spelling Yzbl "is now attested on a seal in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem that is thought to be Phoenician in origin." The dates for Alma are those in the page 42 passage above, set against a departure from Jerusalem about 600 BC. |
tvedtnes-2000:g |
Page 44: "By 1997, Robert Deutsch was able to report that some 510 bullae had been published. Arrowheads are another source for the names." |
tvedtnes-2000:h |
Page 43, Sariah is "transliterated Seraiah in English, though spelled the same in Hebrew". Page 47, Himni beside Haman and Heman. Page 49: "One might wish to compare Jarom with the biblical name Jehoram, which is found twenty-one times in the Bible, while its hypocoristic form Joram occurs twenty-four times"; and Isabel: LDS scholars have assumed the name "is identical to that of the Old Testament Jezebel … and this is probably correct." Page 51: "Mathonihah would correspond to KJV Mattaniah". |
tvedtnes-2000:i |
Page 42, the article's opening: "Some have proposed Hebrew etymologies for many of the nonbiblical names used in Nephite and Lamanite society." Page 43: "In addition to Alma and Sariah, a number of other Nephite names are attested in ancient Hebrew inscriptions." |
Mitka R. Golub, Onomasticon.net (data file of April 2025)
Golub, Mitka R. Onomasticon.net: Personal Names from the Iron II Southern Levant. Data file data-2025-04.json, read on Oct 1, 2026. Licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. The file has 1,081 records, each with the name in Hebrew letters, the artifact, its type, the site, the kingdom and any divine-name element. By kingdom: Judah 816, Israel 126, Ammon 69, Philistia 48, Edom 12, Moab 4, Phoenicia 4. By artifact: 425 ostraca, 247 stamped jars, 166 bullae, 117 seals. The site's description of its scope: "The personal names were collected from artifacts found in archaeological excavations in the land of Israel and Transjordan during the Iron II—from the 10th century until the destruction of the First Temple in 586. Names found on artifacts from the antiquities market were excluded since the geographical origin is unknown and the authenticity is not always certain."
Hugh Nibley, Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites (1952)
Nibley, Hugh. Lehi in the Desert and the World of the Jaredites. Salt Lake City: Bookcraft. 1952. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of Internet Archive item lehiindesertworl0000unse, a scanned copy that is not stored in this project's library. Pages come from the scan's page map (leaf minus 12) and were confirmed against the running head "STRANGE NAMES 29" on leaf 41. The scan is OCR, and line-break hyphens were closed up.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
nibley-1952:a |
Page 24: "Paanchi is simply the well-known Egyptian Paiankh (also rendered Pianchi, Paankh, etc.). The first important man to bear the name was none other than the son of the above-mentioned Kherihor." Page 25 adds: "A striking coincidence is the predominance among both Egyptian and Nephite judge names of the prefix Pa-." |
nibley-1952:b |
Page 30: "It will be noted that the names compared are never exactly alike, except in the case of the monosyllables Sam and Hem. This, strangely enough, is strong confirmation of their common origin, since names are bound to undergo some change with time and distance, whereas if the resemblance were perfect, we should be forced to attribute it … to mere coincidence. There must be differences". The words dropped are "however fantastic it might seem," which the scan prints with a stray dash. |
Thomas J. Finley, "Does the Book of Mormon Reflect an Ancient Near Eastern Background?" in The New Mormon Challenge (2002)
Finley, Thomas J. "Does the Book of Mormon Reflect an Ancient Near Eastern Background?" In The New Mormon Challenge: Responding to the Latest Defenses of a Fast-Growing Movement, edited by Francis J. Beckwith, Carl Mosser and Paul Owen. Grand Rapids: Zondervan. 2002. The chapter begins on page 337. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of Internet Archive item newmormonchallen0000unse, a scanned copy that is not stored in this project's library. Pages come from the scan's page map (leaf minus 4), which puts the chapter title on page 337 as the table of contents does. Finley was professor of Old Testament and Semitics at Talbot School of Theology. His endnotes are not returned by this route and were not read.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
finley-2002:a |
Page 358: "When the names Sara (KJV for the forms in the New Testament), Sarah, Sarai, and Seraiah occur a total of 80 times in the KJV, it is not hard to imagine that the name Sariah could have been invented, with the parallel from Elephantine papyri simply an accident of history." Page 355 on Alma: "Modern potential sources for the name Alma could be, among others, the phrase alma mater or even the transliterated Hebrew word for 'virgin' or 'young woman.'" |
finley-2002:b |
Page 358: "Contrast this with the book of Jeremiah, for which I have counted 29 names that have a suffixed form of /-yah/ or /-yahu/. Among the bullae (seal impressions in clay) found in Jerusalem from about 600 B.C., forty-one names or nearly half the corpus end with /-yahu/." |
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (Oxford University Press, 2010)
Hardy, Grant. Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide. Oxford University Press. 2010. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of Internet Archive item understandingboo0000hard, a scanned copy that cannot be borrowed and is not stored in this project's library. That route returns whole paragraphs but not the endnotes, so Hardy's notes were not read. Arabic page numbers come from the scan's own page map (leaf minus 26). The introduction's roman pages were fixed from the contents page ("Introduction, xi," which is leaf 15) and the running heads on leaves 17, 18, 19 and 21, which print xiii, xiv, xv and xvii. The scan is OCR; line-break hyphens were closed up and note numbers dropped. The book's author note calls Hardy "Professor of History and Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Asheville"; he is a Latter-day Saint.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
hardy-2010:a |
Page 6, item 5 in a numbered list of observations about the book that begins on page 5 with "It is a long book": "It presents a complicated narrative. Not only are there more than a thousand years of history involving some two hundred named individuals and nearly a hundred distinct places, but the narrative itself is presented as the work of three primary editor/historians—Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. These figures, in turn, claim to have based their accounts on dozens of preexisting records." |
hardy-2010:b |
Page 7: "The chronology is handled virtually without glitches, despite several flashbacks and temporally overlapping narratives; there are only two potential geographical discrepancies (at Alma 51:26 and 53:6); and the narrators keep straight both the order and family connections among the twenty-six Nephite record keepers and forty-one Jaredite kings (including rival lines). The complexity is such that one would assume the author worked from charts and maps, though Joseph Smith's wife—the person who had the longest and closest view of the production of the text—explicitly denied that he had written something out beforehand that he either had memorized or consulted as he translated, and indeed she claimed that Joseph began sessions of dictation without looking at the manuscript or having the last passage read back to him." |
hardy-2010:c |
Page 13: "Nephi is not recording events as they happen. Instead, he is a middle-aged man recounting incidents from his teens and early twenties, with the full knowledge that life in the Promised Land has soured, that there has been an irreparable breach with his brothers, and that his closest relatives have spent years trying to kill each other." |
hardy-2010:d |
Page 84: "he has a distinct voice. The next major narrator, Mormon, never includes contextless sermons and has little to say about the House of Israel or the last days. Mormon does not focus on his own life or reinterpret scriptures creatively, and most of all, he is not a visionary." Page 91: "Clearly Mormon shares some of Nephi's concerns—deliverance, faith, revelation, and Christian theology—but his narrative style is distinct. Stories and sermons are set within a thick historical framework and strict chronology, with years ticking by like clockwork. He does not offer much scriptural exegesis, and he has little interest in House of Israel connections or messiah theology—the word messiah occurs twenty-three times in Nephi's writings but only twice in Mormon's work (and never in Moroni's)." |
hardy-2010:e |
Page 220: "Sixteen years after the final battle (though there have apparently been subsequent traumas), Moroni is still in shock." Page 232: "Again and again, it seems that Moroni is deliberately employing language from Nephi's writings to tell the story of the first generation of the Jaredites." |
hardy-2010:f |
Page 105, under the heading "Embedded Documents": "Mormon regularly inserts primary sources into his narrative. These include a memoir by Zeniff (Mosiah 9:1–10:22); an edict of King Mosiah (Mosiah 29:5–32); six letters …; and speeches by King Benjamin (Mosiah 2:9–4:30) and Alma … The transition to embedded documents is usually marked by a clear introduction and a shift from third-person to first-person voice." |
hardy-2010:g |
Page 104: "The history of that colony—some eighty years' worth—is told in a lengthy flashback that extends from Mosiah 9:1 to 21:27 and ends with a second account of the arrival of the searchers, but this time told from the point of view of the colonists. At that point Mormon's secondary narration returns not only to the main narrative sequence but even to the same conversation that had been interrupted thirteen chapters earlier." |
hardy-2010:h |
Page 10: "It appears that after the loss of the first part of the manuscript, Joseph continued his dictation with the book of Mosiah, worked his way to the end of Moroni, and then produced 1 and 2 Nephi, the books that now stand at the beginning of the text. This means that the Book of Mormon narrative was produced out of chronological order, with Words of Mormon being the last section dictated." |
hardy-2010:i |
Page xviii: "I will leave it to others to prove or disprove the historical and religious claims of the book; my goal is to help anyone interested in the Book of Mormon, for whatever reason, become a better, more perceptive reader." |
hardy-2010:j |
Page 26: "I am not, however, making a claim about a historical Nephi; I am trying to make sense of a text." And: "Although it may sometimes appear as if my analysis assumes the historicity of the text, the sorts of observations and inferences I put forward could just as readily be made about an intricately constructed, multivocal, narrated novel such as Nabokov's Pale Fire." |
hardy-2010:k |
Page 28: "In order to conceptualize the Book of Mormon as fiction, we must picture Joseph Smith imagining a history of the Nephites and then imagining narrators who interact with that history and with each other." |
hardy-2010:l |
Page 121: "The Book of Mormon, with its multiple records, plates, writers, and editors, is anything but a naive, straightforward narrative. This makes it something of a puzzle. If Joseph Smith had intended to author a religious morality tale, either to gain converts or to make money, he could have written something much simpler. Latter-day Saints regard the integrated complexity of the text (especially in light of its oral dictation) as evidence of both its divine transmission and the contingencies of its origins as an actual historical record. Skeptics might point to the precedents of early modern novels by authors such as Aphra Behn, Samuel Richardson, Laurence Sterne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Mary Shelley that similarly incorporated letters, memoirs, and diaries. Or they might note that Gothic novels of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries offered a profusion of fictions framed as discovered-manuscript stories". |
hardy-2010:m |
Page 7 for the two geographical discrepancies, quoted above. Page 118: "Such flashbacks and multiple accounts are complex editorial maneuvers, but Mormon handles them adroitly. Nevertheless, there are still evidences of extensive editing. For example, the 'many battles' of Alma 25:3 and 27:1 do not quite correspond to the account in 16:6–9, where the Lamanites were driven back after one great battle". |
Brent Lee Metcalfe, "The Priority of Mosiah," in New Approaches to the Book of Mormon (1993)
Metcalfe, Brent Lee. "The Priority of Mosiah: A Prelude to Book of Mormon Exegesis." In New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology, edited by Brent Lee Metcalfe. Salt Lake City: Signature Books. 1993. The chapter begins on page 395. Read on Oct 1, 2026 from the OCR text of Internet Archive item NewApproachesToTheBookOfMormon. Pages were fixed from the printed page numbers the OCR keeps at each page head.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
metcalfe-1993:a |
Page 409: "A computer-generated word count displays 668 usages of 'therefore' (1,236 in the KJV) and 420 of 'wherefore' in the 1830 Book of Mormon (347 in the KJV …). No clear linear pattern of development for 'therefore'/'wherefore' emerges when the words are ordered according to a 1 Nephi chronology. Instead, what emerges is an enveloping pattern (see Table 1). Here sizeable blocks of narrative dominated by 'wherefore' envelop a central portion favoring 'therefore.'" |
metcalfe-1993:b |
Page 412: "Viewing each chapter sequentially the shift in Ether from 'therefore' to 'wherefore' is striking. Ether 1–5 has 'therefore' 15 times and 'wherefore' 8 times. 'Therefore' is used 8 times in Ether 6–10, 'wherefore' increasing to 23 times. In the final third, Ether 11–15, 'therefore' diminishes to 2 occurrences while 'wherefore' appears 32 times." |
Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part Three (online edition)
Skousen, Royal. Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, Part Three: Mosiah 17 – Alma 20. The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon, volume 4. Online edition, The Interpreter Foundation; first published by FARMS. Read on Oct 1, 2026 from the PDF, which prints the page number in brackets at the foot of each page. The file carries no title page, and the year follows the online edition of Part Two.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
skousen-2014:a |
Page 1418, on Mosiah 21:28. The apparatus line reads "king [Benjamin 1A|Mosiah BCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRST]," where 1 is the printer's manuscript and A the 1830 edition. "This passage clearly implies that king Benjamin is still alive." "Perhaps Ammon and his men left not knowing that Benjamin had died, or perhaps he was still alive when they left." "Another possibility, of course, is that the original record read Benjamin simply because of Mormon's own mistake in abridging the record". "Here in Mosiah 21:28, the 1837 edition made the change from Benjamin to Mosiah to avoid the apparent contradiction. Presumably, this emendation was made by Joseph Smith, although the change is not marked in the printer's manuscript." |
S. R. Driver, An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament (1910)
Driver, S. R. An Introduction to the Literature of the Old Testament. International Theological Library. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1910 printing of the revised edition. Read on Oct 1, 2026 from the library's text of the Internet Archive scan; pages are the scan's running heads. Public domain. It is cited as the classic statement of the grounds, not as the latest word.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
driver-1910:a |
Page 236: "Authorship of c. 40-66. Three independent lines of argument converge to show that this prophecy is not the work of Isaiah, but … has for its author a prophet writing towards the close of the Babylonian captivity." Page 237: "The prophet speaks always, in the first instance, to his own contemporaries … In the present prophecy there is no prediction of exile: the exile is not announced as something still future; it is presupposed, and only the release from it is predicted. By analogy, therefore, the author will have lived in the situation which he thus presupposes, and to which he continually alludes." Page 238: "(2) The argument derived from the historic function of prophecy is confirmed by the literary style of c. 40-66". Page 242 begins the third: "(3) The theological ideas of c. 40-66". |
driver-1910:b |
Page 243: the chapters are "the work of an author writing towards the close of the exile, and predicting the approaching conquest of Babylon by Cyrus, and the restoration of the Jews, just as Isaiah predicted the failure of Rezin and Pekah, or the deliverance of Jerusalem from Sennacherib. It need only be added (for the purpose of precluding misconception) that this view of its date and authorship in no way impairs the theological value of the prophecy, or reduces it to a vaticinium ex eventu: on the one hand, the whole tone of the prophecy shows that it is written prior to the events which it declares to be approaching; on the other, it nowhere claims either to be written by Isaiah, or to have originated in his age." The scan garbles the word "to" before "a vaticinium," which is restored here. |
B. H. Roberts, Studies of the Book of Mormon, ed. Brigham D. Madsen (1985)
Roberts, B. H. Studies of the Book of Mormon. Edited by Brigham D. Madsen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. 1985. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of Internet Archive item studiesofbookofm00bhro, a scanned copy that is not stored in this project's library. Pages come from the scan's own page map (leaf minus 40), checked at leaf 97 (page 57) and leaf 290 (page 250). The scan is OCR. Roberts (1857–1933) was a member of the First Council of the Seventy.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
roberts-1985:a |
Madsen's introduction, page 21: "Roberts presented his treatise to the assembled General Authorities over a period of two days — January 4-5, 1922". Page 26: "In addition to his two longer treatises — 'Book of Mormon Difficulties' and 'A Book of Mormon Study' already described — Roberts authored a third document based on his investigations of the Ethan Smith book. This quite brief analysis … was apparently written during the 1920s and given the title 'A Parallel.'" |
roberts-1985:b |
"A Book of Mormon Study," page 240: "But now to return from this momentary divergence to the main theme of this writing — viz., did Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews furnish structural material for Joseph Smith's Book of Mormon? It has been pointed out in these pages that there are many things in the former book that might well have suggested many major things in the other. Not a few things merely, one or two, or a half dozen, but many; and it is this fact of many things of similarity and the cumulative force of them that makes them so serious a menace to Joseph Smith's story of the Book of Mormon's origin." |
roberts-1985:c |
"A Book of Mormon Study," page 250: "In the light of this evidence, there can be no doubt as to the possession of a vividly strong, creative imagination by Joseph Smith, the Prophet, an imagination, it could with reason be urged, which, given the suggestions that are to be found in the 'common knowledge' of accepted American antiquities of the times, supplemented by such a work as Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, would make it possible for him to create a book such as the Book of Mormon is." Madsen's introduction, page 15, lists the works Roberts thought Joseph Smith might have reached: "the publications of the American Antiquarian Society, 1820; Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews, second edition, 1825; The History of the American Indians, by James Adair, 1775; and Alexander Humboldt's books on New Spain, 1811." |
roberts-1985:d |
Roberts's letter to President Heber J. Grant and the apostles, dated March 15, 1923 in the typescript and 1922 by the editor. Page 57: "In writing out this my report to you of those studies, I have written it from the viewpoint of an open mind, investigating the facts of the Book of Mormon origin and authorship. Let me say once and for all, so as to avoid what might otherwise call for repeated explanation, that what is herein set forth does not represent any conclusions of mine." Page 58: "I am taking the position that our faith is not only unshaken but unshakable in the Book of Mormon, and therefore we can look without fear upon all that can be said against it." |
roberts-1985:e |
Madsen's introduction, page 26, on the letter: "he had reconsidered and had sent neither". Page 30: "Whether or not Roberts retained his belief in the Book of Mormon may never be determined. In his last conference address of April 1933 he referred to the Book of Mormon as 'one of the most valuable books that has ever been preserved, even as holy scripture.'" |
Chris and Duane Johnson, "A Comparison of The Book of Mormon and The Late War" (2014)
Johnson, Chris, and Johnson, Duane. "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; last edited Mar 9, 2014. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026. An earlier draft of this article could not find the study because it looked for it at wordtree.org, which no longer resolves.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
johnson-2014:a |
Summary: "In October 2013, the authors conducted a data analysis comparing The Book of Mormon to over 100,000 books from the pre-1830's era." Under "How rare are the 4gram matches?": "If a 4 word phrase (4-gram) showed up less than once per thousand books, we considered it to be a rare 4-gram. After all biblical matches were removed from the comparison, the computer algorithm found over 100 rare 4-grams shared by both The Book of Mormon and The Late War. To put this into perspective, we found that The Late War contained more rare 4-gram connections to The Book of Mormon than 99.999% of the other books published before 1830." The one book they name as a comparison is Pride and Prejudice. |
Wayne A. Larsen, Alvin C. Rencher and Tim Layton, "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints," BYU Studies 20:3 (1980)
Larsen, Wayne A.; Rencher, Alvin C.; and Layton, Tim. "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints." BYU Studies 20:3. 1980. Pages 225–251. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 from the journal's page-image PDF, re-read by OCR for this article because the PDF's own text layer drops capitals and punctuation. The PDF's pages carry the printed numbers, which run 224 ahead of the PDF page count.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
larsen-1980:a |
Pages 232–233: "The writings of our 24 authors were divided into 251 blocks of text containing approximately 1,000 words apiece. Mormon was presumed to be the author of 98 of these blocks, while the last three authors—Mosiah, Enos, and the Father—had only 1 block each." And: "The 10 words which we compared were and, the, of, that, to, unto, in, it, for, and be." The first eleven words of the first quotation are supplied from the PDF's own text layer; the rest is the OCR reading. |
larsen-1980:b |
Pages 232–233: "Statistically, the differences among the authors are highly significant. Differences as large as these simply could not occur if a single author wrote the book. The statistical odds that a single author wrote the book are less than 1 in 100 billion. However, this number should not be taken too literally. It depends on several assumptions, one of which is that we have a random sample of each author's writings." |
larsen-1980:c |
Page 238: "In the computer run with 2,000-word blocks and 18 words selected, 93.3 percent of the blocks were correctly classified." Page 245 gives the range across runs: "When one block at a time was withheld from computation and then submitted, the percentage of correct classifications varied from 50 to 81 percent." |
larsen-1980:d |
Page 243: "The results of MANOVA, discriminant analysis, and cluster analysis all strongly support multiple authorship of the Book of Mormon. According to some of the MANOVA results, the odds against the Book of Mormon having a single author are more than a billion to one. Of course the assumptions for MANOVA should be checked. For example, it is unlikely that the data can be considered to have come from a multivariate normal distribution." Page 244: "It does not seem possible that Joseph Smith or any other writer could have fabricated a work with 24 or more discernible authorship styles (wordprints)." And: "The Book of Mormon authors taken individually or collectively do not resemble any of the nineteenth-century authors which we considered, taken individually or collectively." |
larsen-1980:e |
Page 234: "There is some evidence of a wordprint time trend within the Book of Mormon; i.e., writers are more similar to their contemporaries than to writers in other time periods. This needs further investigation." |
larsen-1980:f |
Page 247, the word list of Appendix C, which includes "therefore 576" and "wherefore 368." Page 250, under the table of discriminant-function coefficients: "In Function 1, the words and, of, unto, for, contribute heavily. In Function 2, the most important contributors are the, that, to, be, this, and therefore." |
John L. Hilton, "On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship," BYU Studies 30:3 (1990)
Hilton, John L. "On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship." BYU Studies 30:3. Summer 1990. Pages 89–108. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 from the journal's web text and its page-image PDF, whose printed page numbers run 88 ahead of the PDF page count.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
hilton-1990:a |
Page 96: "Specifically, this extended verification study tested the validity of our model by calculating 325 diverse wordprint tests. These tests studied 26 noncontroversial 5000-word texts which had been written under various conditions by nine different control authors". Page 97: the 33 within-author measurements "yield a statistically smooth distribution peaking at about 2 rejections," and "The distribution peak for between-author comparisons is about 7 rejections." Also page 97: "If we have only two 5000-word texts and their paired testing measures 1 to 6 rejections … we cannot assign authorship unambiguously because the within-author and between-author distributions overlap each other in this range." Note 19, page 108, gives the number of patterns: "Typically between 40 to 47 of Morton's 65 word patterns are measured often enough to be accepted as statistically useful." |
hilton-1990:b |
Page 99: "Taking the comparisons of Nephi versus Alma, we found that in eight of the nine tests, 5 or more rejections resulted. Four of these tests produced 7, 8, 9, and 10 rejections." |
hilton-1990:c |
Page 101: "By using a new wordprint measuring methodology which has been verified, we show that it is statistically indefensible to propose Joseph Smith or Oliver Cowdery or Solomon Spaulding as the author of the 30,000 words from the Book of Mormon manuscript texts attributed to Nephi and Alma. … Therefore, the Book of Mormon measures multiauthored, with authorship consistent to its own internal claims." The Joseph Smith comparison texts are listed in the appendix on page 106: "Autographic letters to wife Emma, friends, and the Church (1834–38)" and a section of his history "dictated and carefully polished with the assistance of his clerks." |
David I. Holmes, "A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 155:1 (1992)
Holmes, David I. "A Stylometric Analysis of Mormon Scripture and Related Texts." Journal of the Royal Statistical Society, Series A 155:1. 1992. Pages 91–120. Read on Oct 1, 2026 through the search-inside text of the Internet Archive's microfilm copy of the issue, item sim_journal-of-the-royal-statistical-society-series-a_1992_155_1, which cannot be borrowed and is not stored in this project's library. No JSTOR read was used. Pages come from the scan's own page map (leaf minus 5), under which the article runs from leaf 96 to leaf 125, pages 91 to 120, as published. Tables and figures are not returned by this route and were not seen.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
holmes-1992:a |
Page 95: "We now have five variables, each of which measures the richness of vocabulary of a writer in some sense, yet are stable with regard to text length". Page 99: "The aim of the present writer's editing process was to produce samples of text, each approximately 10000 words in length, of 'pure' writing by prophets." Page 100: "The 14 samples of pure prophet writing ultimately extracted in this way". Page 102: "three independent samples, of 9983, 9982 and 9974 words, were selected from sections 1-51 of Doctrine and Covenants". |
holmes-1992:b |
Page 97: "The most impressive statistical analysis carried out on the Book of Mormon is that undertaken by Larsen et al. (1980)". Page 98, on the 1980 paper's remark that wordprint tests found Shakespeare's plays uniform: "This is a very superficial view for which Larsen and his collaborators provide no statistical support." |
holmes-1992:c |
Page 117: "This study has therefore not found any evidence of multiple authorship within the Book of Mormon itself. Variation within samples from the same prophet is generally as great as any variation between the prophets". Also page 117: "All the plots obtained from this research show that the samples of Joseph Smith's revelations do not form a separate homogeneous cluster in the manner of his own writings or of the King James Bible." Page 118: "It is my conclusion, from the results of this research and the supporting historical evidence, that the Book of Mormon sprang from the prophetic voice of Joseph Smith himself, as did his revelations and the text of the Book of Abraham." And: "We have seen that the style of his prophetic voice, as evidenced by the main cluster of the textual samples studied, differs from the style of his personal writings or dictations of a personal nature." |
Matthew L. Jockers, Daniela M. Witten and Craig S. Criddle, "Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon," Literary and Linguistic Computing 23:4 (2008)
Jockers, Matthew L.; Witten, Daniela M.; and Criddle, Craig S. "Reassessing Authorship of the Book of Mormon Using Delta and Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification." Literary and Linguistic Computing 23:4. 2008. Pages 465–491. The publisher's copy is behind a paywall. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 in two open copies: the authors' preprint, and Dale Broadhurst's transcript of the published article, which marks the journal's page breaks. Wording and numbers were checked in both, and the pages are the journal's, from the transcript.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
jockers-2008:a |
Page 470: "we seek to classify a text sample of unknown authorship into one of a fixed number of known author categories—in this case a closed set of candidate authors: Rigdon, Spalding, Cowdery, Longfellow, etc." |
jockers-2008:b |
Page 471: "We did not include Joseph Smith in the analysis because, as noted above, there is currently no reliable corpus of Joseph Smith text." |
jockers-2008:c |
Page 472: "The lowest NSC error rate was obtained when all 110 words were included; the error rate was 8.8%. This means that we would expect to classify correctly a new sample written by one of the seven candidate authors 91.2% of the time." |
jockers-2008:d |
Page 473, Table 1, "Number of chapters assigned to each author based on NSC probability assignments for the seven-author case (Barlow and Longfellow controls included)," first-choice row: Cowdery 20, Pratt 9, Rigdon 93, Spalding 52, Isaiah and Malachi 63, Barlow 0, Longfellow 2. The table's own note: "If chapter assignments were random, the expected number for each choice would be 239/7 = 34." |
jockers-2008:e |
Page 465, abstract: "Our findings support the hypothesis that Rigdon was the main architect of the Book of Mormon and are consistent with historical evidence suggesting that he fabricated the book by adding theology to the unpublished writings of Spalding (then deceased)." |
G. Bruce Schaalje, Paul J. Fields, Matthew Roper and Gregory L. Snow, "Extended nearest shrunken centroid classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 26:1 (2011)
Schaalje, G. Bruce; Fields, Paul J.; Roper, Matthew; and Snow, Gregory L. "Extended nearest shrunken centroid classification: A new method for open-set authorship attribution of texts of varying sizes." Literary and Linguistic Computing 26:1. 2011. Pages 71–88. The publisher's copy is behind a paywall. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 from the journal PDF that Matthew Roper posted on ResearchGate, which carries the printed page numbers. The abstract was checked against the publisher's page. Schaalje and Fields were in the Department of Statistics at Brigham Young University.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
schaalje-2011:a |
Page 71: "Many, possibly most, authorship attribution problems are 'open games' (Burrows 2002) in which it is not realistic to unquestionably assume that the author of the text in question is contained in the candidate set (Koppel et al., 2009). One purpose of this article is to show that failure to recognize or deal with this issue produces highly misleading results." The abstract makes the same point: "most importantly the set of candidate authors cannot usually be assumed to be closed. Consequently, naïve application of NSC methodology can produce misleading results." |
schaalje-2011:b |
Page 74: "We first emphasize that naïve use of closed-set NSC classification in open-set situations will always produce inflated and misleading values for the posterior probabilities." |
schaalje-2011:c |
Page 75: "Early or late Rigdon was falsely chosen as the author of 28 of the 51 Hamilton texts with inflated posterior probabilities ranging as high as 0.9999 (Fig. 2). Pratt was falsely chosen as the author of 12 of the papers, and Cowdery was falsely chosen as the author of the remaining 11 papers." |
schaalje-2011:d |
Page 83: "Of the 239 chapters, 68 (28.5%) were classified to Isaiah, 96 (40.2%) were classified to early or late Rigdon, 37 (15.5%) were classified to Spalding, 29 (12.1%) were classified to Smith, 4 (1.7%) were classified to Cowdery, and 5 (2.1%) were classified to Pratt. However, the goodness-of-fit check … showed that the posterior predictions did not match the observed test data; hence the naïve closed-set NSC classification results are not valid. We then carried out the extended open-set NSC procedure. Of the 239 Book of Mormon chapters, 175 (73.2%) were classified to one or more unobserved authors, 35 (14.6%) were classified to Isaiah, 17 (7.1%) were classified to early or late Rigdon, 8 (3.4%) were classified to Smith, 2 (0.8%) were classified to Spalding, and 2 (0.8%) were classified to Cowdery". Page 82 puts it in a sentence: "using open-set NSC, we conclude that 73% of the chapters cannot be reliably attributed to any of the candidate authors." |
schaalje-2011:e |
Page 78: "It is important to note that the open-set NSC procedure does not indicate how many unobserved authors there are. All we know is that if an unobserved author is selected for a test text, one unobserved author is most probable as the author of that text. There could be as many unobserved authors as the number of test texts, or as few as one." Pages 83–84: "there is little stylometric support for the Spalding–Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship. Less than 9% of the non-Isaiah chapters were attributed Rigdon or Spalding … In future studies with the Book of Mormon, we intend to adjust for the deliberate archaic language used throughout." |
Matthew L. Jockers, "Testing Authorship in the Personal Writings of Joseph Smith Using NSC Classification," Literary and Linguistic Computing 28:3 (2013)
Jockers, Matthew L. "Testing Authorship in the Personal Writings of Joseph Smith Using NSC Classification." Literary and Linguistic Computing 28:3. 2013. Pages 371–381. The publisher's copy is behind a paywall. Read in full on Oct 1, 2026 from the author's 24-page manuscript, which he posted on ResearchGate. The locators below are manuscript pages, not journal pages. The abstract was checked against the publisher's page and agrees.
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
jockers-2013:a |
Manuscript page 8: "The lowest error rate (12.8%) was obtained using all 106 words. … In cross-validation, documents in Smith's hand were only correctly attributed to Smith 64% of the time; while overall mean precision across samples was 82%." Manuscript page 12: "these 15 documents assigned to Smith represent only 16% of the personal writings not in Smith's hand. 33% of the scribe-written documents are assigned (first place) to Cowdery and 25% to Pratt." |
jockers-2013:b |
Manuscript page 16: "The only conclusion comfortably reached here is that the decision to exclude Smith from prior work investigating the authorship of the Book of Mormon was entirely justified. Smith's collected personal writings possess a great deal of stylistic variation—even among the works in his own hand". The manuscript does not contain the term "open-set" or the name Schaalje. |
Royal Skousen, "The Language of the Original Text of the Book of Mormon" (2018): quotation added Oct 1, 2026
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
skousen-2018:h |
In the list of ways the text departs from Early Modern English: "(b) In the original text, we have the nearly consistent use of the extra conjunctive and after a complex subordinate clause and before its following main clause (as originally in Moroni 10:4 …). As far as I know, this syntactic structure (which is Hebrew-like, but is strictly speaking not a Hebraism) has never occurred in English." |
William L. Davis, "Joseph Smith's Spiritual Language" (2025): quotations added Oct 1, 2026
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
davis-2025:g |
Davis, quoting Skousen's Nature of the Original Language (3:51): these conditionals are "not exactly a normal Hebraism since the equivalent cases involving simple subordinate clauses (such as 'if you come and I will come') are not found in the Book of Mormon text." Davis's note 4 quotes Skousen's Grammatical Variation (1:362) to the same effect: "the comparison between the Hebrew construction and the corresponding one in the Book of Mormon is not always fully parallel," and "Sometimes it might be better to refer to these potential Hebraisms as Hebrew-like constructions." Skousen's volumes were not opened; the words are his as Davis prints them. |
davis-2025:h |
"Skousen's association of these forms with Hebrew does not, however, take into account the close relationships that these structures share with similar English-language models in the New Testament." Davis then prints Matthew 17:20, Helaman 10:9, Helaman 12:17, Helaman 12:13 and Luke 17:6 together, and adds: "From a technical perspective, it is important to observe that these Book of Mormon and New Testament examples are not grammatically identical; they convey different dynamics." And: "note the conspicuous six-word, verbatim phrase, 'ye shall say unto this mountain,' appearing in both Matthew 17:20 and Helaman 10:9." |
davis-2025:i |
Davis, quoting Skousen's Grammatical Variation (1:362, Davis's note 14): "The original Book of Mormon text frequently separates an initial subordinate clause from its following main clause by means of an unexpected use of the connector and." Davis reports that these constructions often contain what Skousen calls an "intervening clause" or "some kind of interruption or extended subordination" (his note 15, citing the same page and Nature of the Original Language 3:50), that the oddity appears with "after, as, because, had, if, when, and while" (his note 17, citing Grammatical Variation 1:366–376), and that 1 Nephi 8:13 in simplified form reads "as I cast my eyes around about . . . And I beheld a river of water." |
Paul J. Fields, G. Bruce Schaalje and Matthew Roper, "Examining a Misapplication of Nearest Shrunken Centroid Classification" (2011): quotations added Oct 1, 2026
| Footnote | Locator and words |
|---|---|
fields-2011:e |
Page 107: "As also shown in figure 10, ENSC assigns 0 percent of the Book of Mormon chapters to Spalding-Rigdon, 4 percent to Cowdery, 3 percent to Smith, and 93 percent to 'Someone Else,' indicating that the writing styles of the candidate authors show very little resemblance to the writing styles in the Book of Mormon." Figure 10 is the comparison "with the control authors removed." Figure 9, on page 106, is the run with Isaiah and Malachi kept, and gives 73 percent. |
fields-2011:f |
Page 96: "Consequently, the correct interpretation of Holmes's finding is not that 'there are no differences among the tested authors,' but rather that he 'found no evidence of difference.' Not finding evidence of difference may therefore say little about the subject of the test but can be an indication of the test's inadequacy." Pages 96–97, citing Schaalje, Hilton and Archer 1997, which was not opened: "correct classification rates were 96 percent using noncontextual word frequencies, 92 percent for noncontextual word-pattern ratios, but only 23 percent for vocabulary richness measures." |