Jeffrey R. Holland boldly claimed, publicly:
“If anyone is foolish enough or misled enough to reject 531 pages of a heretofore unknown text teeming with literary and Semitic complexity without honestly attempting to account for the origin of those pages…. then such a person, elect or otherwise, has been deceived; and if he or she leaves this Church, it must be done by crawling over or under or around the Book of Mormon to make that exit.”
I could foolishly crawl “over or under or around the Book of Mormon,” but instead, like a firey salamander, I will crawl and burn my way straight through the text of the Book of Mormon, to attempt to account for the origin of each of the 239 chapters of the book.
Here is the Book of Mormon: Missing Footnotes Edition.
Note: these annotations only refer to the 1830 published first edition, and all substantive changes are referred to as Edits. (For further comparison, Royal Skousen’s careful The Earliest Text edition can be consulted.)
For a list of broad topics, see: Anti-Universalism, A Brief Note, B.H. Roberts, The Late War, Mound-Builder Myth, Non-Biblical Phrases, Priestcraft, Racism, Second Great Awakening, Secret Combinations, Title Page Changes, Translator, Trinitarianism/Modalism, Treasure-Digging, View of the Hebrews, and Witnesses. Finally, peruse the Bibliography.
Material from the Book of Mormon can be categorized into three broad groups of sources:
1. The King James Version of the Bible, including apocrypha, including block quotes as well as phrases and ideas;
2. Post-biblical 16th- through 19th-Century Material, including historical references, geographical and scientific anachronisms, literature, theological sermons, magazine or newspaper articles, books, hymns;
3. JS Jr. writing about himself (events or motifs from Joseph Smith Jr.'s own life), and The Book of Mormon writing about itself. A very small source of material includes edits to the text itself, after its initial 1830s publication. A handful of these are substantive. Finally, the balance of material is the expected minimal connective narrative material filling in the remaining gaps.
As a sort of summary of this project, the ancient New World prophets clearly knew more about the 18th and 19th century, and the Christian Bible, than they did about life in the New World. In fact, their knowledge perfectly matched JS Jr.'s knowledge (ignorance, really) of the subject, exactly as we would expect.
For a list of broad topics, see: Anti-Universalism, A Brief Note, B.H. Roberts, The Late War, Mound-Builder Myth, Non-Biblical Phrases, Priestcraft, Racism, Second Great Awakening, Secret Combinations, Title Page Changes, Translator, Trinitarianism/Modalism, Treasure-Digging, View of the Hebrews, and Witnesses. Finally, peruse the Bibliography.
I hope hundreds of data points strewn throughout the entire book show that it is definitely possible for Joseph Smith Jr. to have produced the book.
Doug Stilgoe (Nemo the Mormon) says (in a slightly different context, but it applies here too):
Apologists make an argument from incredulity about the Book of Mormon, how could it be possible that a farm boy wrote this thing? And all these questions [and data] do is make it far less incredulous that it was possible that he could have just done it himself.
As Dan Vogel, Grant Palmer, and others have pointed out, it is certainly possible that only Joseph Smith Jr., writing in the 1820s, could have produced The Book of Mormon.
Dan Vogel adds: “It is difficult to imagine what the ancient text could have looked like once the anachronisms are removed.” As a challenge to the apologists who believe that Joseph was adding 16th-, 17th-, 18th-, and 19th-century phrases and ideas (and anachronisms) atop an ancient core, I would ask, what ancient core? Nearly every chapter is either dripping with references to the Bible (many before those parts were even written), or tainted with information from JS Jr.’s time. Just going through the book chapter by chapter shows how it is unabashedly and unrelentingly anachronistic. This probably proves nothing to believers who maintain its status as revelation, since, as the book claims, it is a book for our day, no question. But, to be blunt, apologists and Church leaders need to stop vilifying those who claim it could be explained in any other way (than as ancient, or a revelation, or both), and stop picking fights with the brutal collossus of the text itself.
Apologists might deride the very idea of a project attempting to atomize the text of the Book of Mormon into a list of chapter-by-chapter problems or phrase-by-phrase influences as the very definition of reductionism, because it ignores the feat of composing a Book of Mormon by synthesis, as a whole. I agree. However, I don’t hear apostles and Church presidents preaching the idea of a synthetic Book of Mormon text; rather they are the ones arguing the opposite, using polemical, black-and-white thinking—absolute literalism, including ancient origin, in other words: Gordon B. Hinkley, Jeffrey R. Holland, other presidents and apostles for decades and decades. Elder Holland, again, very publicly claimed:
Consign both man [Joseph Smith Jr.] and [Book of Mormon] to Hades for the devastating deception of it all, but let’s not have any bizarre middle ground about the wonderful contours of a young boy’s imagination or his remarkable facility for turning a literary phrase. That is an unacceptable position to take—morally, literarily, historically, or theologically.
Perhaps the nuanced believing scholars (that he calls out) and honest apologists and critics would agree that the leadership causes harm when they say bombastic things that leave no “bizarre middle ground” for nuance? Again, some of these bold, misguided quotes by the leadership can become the impetus and sustaining fodder for a project like this, practically begging to be challenged. (But I would argue that the reason the quotes work is that the leadership knows that most believers and even most critics will not take the actual text of the Book seriously, to do the real work of actually reading it and contextualizing it carefully.)
Grant Hardy summarizes his take on the Book of Mormon’s unique quirkiness in two words: “Creative anachronism,” which I would argue summarizes the entire Book of Mormon quite succinctly. Critics could use a reminder of how much creativity it would take to weave all of this together, especially under naturalistic assumptions (no supernatural external inspiration, no hidden ancient source, performed live as a dictation by a relatively young, self-trained sermonizer). And believers could be reminded how core anachronism is to the entire Book of Mormon, from top to bottom.
John G. Turner explains a similar concept:
I think Joseph’s detractors and critics and even contemporary detractors and critics—if [they] find possible influences and precendent, it takes away from the idea that Joseph’s texts are just bolts out the blue, in terms of revelation, and I think that’s fair.
At the same time, if we lean too much into the idea that this source or that source—or this thinker or that thinker—explains what Joseph is doing, we run the risk of missing his creative engagement with these ideas. Joseph doesn’t just take ideas out of View of the Hebrews, he doesn’t just take ideas from Thomas Dick, I think he encounters these ideas in his culture—to put it in really colloquial terms—they bounce around in his brain, and he produces what I think are original and creative efforts that go off in new directions.
Terryl Givens calls JS Jr. “an inspired syncretist,” saying that he engages in bricolage, as a way of faithfully acknowledging how essential outside influences were to the way Joseph worked, even in Joseph’s work outside of the Book of Mormon.
Note that I’m sure apologists will come out of the woodwork to go down each of these rabbit holes and twist things around to show that “horse doesn’t mean horse, wine doesn’t mean wine,” etc. and convince themselves that they have chopped down every single tree, but they do so by continually avoiding stepping back and looking at the forest. (Some even admit this is what they are doing: starting from a place of faith—I believe Kerry Mulsteen claimed as much.) Speaking of reductionism, this refusal of the apologists to open their eyes and simply look at the whole forest, even when dragged by the hand by critics (and a few intellectually honest believing scholars), to stand atop mounds of evidence—reminds us why 99.8% of the world just ignores the Book of Mormon and never takes the faithful viewpoint seriously. In other words: your message (hardline literalism, defend instead of discuss) is unconvincing except to the few who already believe. Believers need to light the way and be way more open to serious discussion, and they can start by taking the actual text of the Book of Mormon more seriously.
Yet these same apologists, lacking an incentive to dig in and find any of these problems themselves, merely react to perceived attacks (facts are not attacks) on JS Jr. and this one specific synthesis of the gospel of Jesus Christ—when they should instead be thanking the critics for leading the way by uncovering all these issues and providing apologists with ongoing job security. You’re welcome. Also, if you are an apologist and you are irritated by Book of Mormon criticism, and its detrimental impact on people’s faith, then maybe you should consider how powerful that same feeling of irritation is in lighting and sustaining a fire under the critics, who feel practically forced to respond to the weak apologetics in the first place. And if you want people to have a foundation for their faith, it needs to be based on truth and facts: “If ye have faith ye hope for things which are not seen, which are true.” The truth can never undermine true faith. Only false faith, based on misconceptions, can be hurt by facts and open and honest discussion.
For a list of broad topics, see: Anti-Universalism, A Brief Note, B.H. Roberts, The Late War, Mound-Builder Myth, Non-Biblical Phrases, Priestcraft, Racism, Second Great Awakening, Secret Combinations, Title Page Changes, Translator, Trinitarianism/Modalism, Treasure-Digging, View of the Hebrews, and Witnesses. Finally, peruse the Bibliography.