Response Page | Book of Mormon

(NOTE: This article is an edited extract from the author's book Refuting the Critics: Evidences of the Book of Mormon's Authenticity, Horizon Publishers, 1993. The full version of the article, including the references, can be found therein.)

THE BOOK OF MORMON--ANCIENT OR MODERN? COULD JOSEPH SMITH HAVE WRITTEN THE NEPHITE RECORD?

Michael T. Griffith

1993

@All Rights Reserved

After the Book of Mormon was published, anti-Mormon critics proposed two basic theories to explain the book's origin. Some critics maintained that Joseph Smith himself simply made it up. This was the first explanation offered (Kirkham 1959:210-213). A few years later, other skeptics asserted that the Nephite record was a clumsy, transparent re-write of Solomon Spaulding's 1812 novel, Manuscript Story, perpetrated by Joseph Smith and/or Sidney Rigdon.

With the convincing refutation of the Spaulding theory, most modern anti-Mormons advocate what is frequently referred to as the environmental theory. This thesis holds that Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, but that he didn't just make it up. According to this naturalistic explanation, Joseph wrote the Nephite record by borrowing heavily from other sources, primarily from various pre-1830 works on the ancient Americas; but also from the Bible, from his own personal experiences, from contemporary political and religious currents, and from folklore of the American frontier (Vogel; Tanner 63-72, 81-88; Marquardt; Walters; Jonas; Hougey).

This theory has also been appropriately called the "sponge theory" or "grab bag theory". What it really boils down to is the assertion that Joseph Smith "grabbed" or "sponged up" whatever "helpful stuff" was "in the air" at the time. In light of the scanty amount of information which would have been of any real use to Joseph Smith, such a theory is grasping at straws.

The 1825 edition of Ethan Smith's work, View of the Hebrews (hereafter VOTH), is the text usually identified by anti-Mormons as Joseph Smith's "foundational source" for the Book of Mormon. For most anti-LDS critics, the VOTH or Ethan Smith theory is the major component of the environmental theory.

The Ethan Smith theory shares a major flaw with the Spaulding theory, in that there is no evidence whatsoever that Joseph Smith read or even knew of the alleged source, in this case VOTH, prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon.

In conjunction with this fact, it is worth noting that Ethan Smith's book was not even mentioned as a potential source for Joseph Smith until decades after the Nephite record was published.

Anti-Mormons have written dozens of books and tracts which purport to document parallels between VOTH and the Nephite record. Critics see their parallels as numerous and complex and as strong evidence of the Book of Mormon's foundational dependence on VOTH.

The most that can be said for the anti-Mormon case is that there are some general resemblances between VOTH and the Nephite text. LDS scholars have thoroughly discredited almost all of the alleged parallels between VOTH and the Book of Mormon, and they have documented numerous significant differences between the two works (Welch 1985a; 1985b; Sperry 1967:176-179; Scharffs 164-169; Crowley 1961:111-133; Weldon and Butterworth 14-16; Nibley 1989:193-206). John Welch's two refutations of the VOTH theory, An Unparallel: Ethan Smith and the Book of Mormon and Finding Answers to B. H. Roberts' Questions, are thorough and convincing. I would recommend them to anyone who wants to investigate this subject in greater detail.

Since so many excellent rebuttals to the VOTH theory have already been written, I will limit myself to a brief examination of a few of the differences between Ethan Smith's book and the Nephite record.

The average page of VOTH (second edition) contains 347 words. The entire book is 286 pages long, or approximately 98,895 words (Crowley 1961:110). The average page of the Book of Mormon, on the other hand, contains 458 words. There are 531 pages in the Nephite record (1981 edition), or approximately 239,076 words. Therefore, the Book of Mormon is nearly twice as long as VOTH.

Ethan Smith concentrated his attention on the Indians of North America. VOTH says little about Mesoamerica. In contrast, the Book of Mormon describes in some detail two major civilizations that once flourished in that region.

Ethan Smith stated in VOTH that the Indians were to be restored to Palestine (64), whereas the Book of Mormon designates their Zion to be in the New World.

According to Ethan Smith, the Indians migrated "through a region where it was always winter, snow and frozen" (78). The Book of Mormon groups came to the New World by ship. The words "snow" and "frozen" don't even appear in the Nephite text.

In connection with the above, Ethan Smith repeatedly asserted that the Indians crossed the Bering Strait en route to the New World (115). Again, the Book of Mormon groups came to Mesoamerica by ship, and they never went near the Bering Strait.

In VOTH, Ethan Smith expressed the view that "we are to expect no new revelations from heaven and the days of miracles are thought to be past" (168) . This is diametrically opposed to the view of the Nephite record (2 Nephi 28-29; Mormon 9).

Anti-Mormons make much of the fact that Ethan Smith's work "tells of a book preserved but finally buried with an Indian chief" (Jonas 39). This is supposed to be the basis of the story of the Book of Mormon plates, which were preserved but finally sealed up in the earth by Moroni. However, Ethan Smith's information about the Indian book came to him third-hand, not straight from an angel of God as in the case of the Nephite record. Furthermore, Ethan Smith had no idea how old the book was, although it doesn't seem to have been very old, judging from the description of it.

Moreover, the book was written on parchment, and the Indians buried it because they couldn't read it and because they thought it "would be of no further use to them" (E. Smith 223; Hougey 44). This hardly compares with the Book of Mormon records, which were written on metallic plates, which were precisely dated, which were read and viewed as priceless and inspired by the Nephites, and which were buried to come forth in the latter days as an integral part of the restoration of the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

In the June 1 and June 15 issues of the 1842 Times and Seasons there appeared printed extracts from Josiah Priest's book, American Antiquities (1838 edition), which cites and quotes passages from VOTH. Priest's book was cited as evidence for the Book of Mormon. At that time, Joseph Smith was the editor of the Times and Seasons. A natural question arises: If Joseph Smith had copied from VOTH, would he have risked drawing attention to it by publicly quoting from a book which contained extracts from it? This would have indeed been extremely puzzling behavior if the Prophet had borrowed from VOTH, especially if it had been his "foundational source"!

This is an obvious but important point, and anti-Mormons have yet to satisfactorily explain it. It is just common sense that plagiarists don't go around drawing attention to their sources, especially in a public forum! Since it had not yet occurred to anyone to accuse Joseph Smith of borrowing from VOTH, why on earth would he have risked exposure by quoting (or allowing to be quoted) a book which contained extracts from it?

The Book of Mormon contains quotations and paraphrases of a number of Bible passages, most of which are from the book of Isaiah in the King James Version. The Nephite text quotes twenty-one complete chapters of Isaiah and parts of others. However, as I shall discuss below, there are also important differences between the Book of Mormon and King James Isaiahs.

Numerous anti-Mormons have labored long and hard to show the passages from the Book of Mormon which are quotations or paraphrases of the Bible. The critics believe these "borrowed" passages discredit the Nephite record's authenticity, but such a view displays a profound lack of knowledge of biblical scholarship and of the nature of scripture.

Rather than discrediting the Book of Mormon, the fact that the Nephite prophets quoted or paraphrased certain parts of the Bible is entirely consistent with the practices of the biblical writers. Indeed, some books in the Bible are simply rewritten forms of other biblical books, "done in an effort to make a new point" (Achtemeier 1980:81). For example, the books of Chronicles are largely a recasting of I and II Kings, rewritten for the purpose of accenting the importance of the Temple in Jerusalem, "and in general to claim for Judah priority over the north in religious matters" (Achtemeier 1980:81). Large passages of Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Nahum, Obadiah, and Zephaniah are so similar as to appear to have been used interchangeably by their authors as they tried to express the "word of the Lord" to them (Bright; Eiselen, Lewis and Downey 680).

The New Testament contains hundreds of quotations and paraphrases from the Old Testament and the Apocrypha (Aland 897-920; Bratcher). For example, it has been estimated that 278 of the 404 verses in the book of Revelation contain references of one kind or another to the Old Testament. And yet, the author of Revelation never specifically mentions an Old Testament book, and he seldom quotes verbatim. In fact, Revelation is "interwoven with O.T. material to a greater extent than any other writing in the N.T." (Stendahl 158-159; cf. Ford 27). Moreover, the book of Revelation also contains 182 allusions to other New Testament books (Ford 42-43). The first three chapters alone contain thirty-eight allusions, while chapters 20-22 show thirty.

Portions of Ephesians and Colossians are virtually identical to each other (Vestal and Wallace 37; Barth 556-606) . As is quite well known, the Gospels of Matthew and Luke are basically expansive rewrites of, or commentaries on, Mark's gospel. Matthew and Luke "not only add material to Mark's general content, but reorder and in some cases recast the Marcan material" (Achtemeier 1980:81). No serious New Testament scholar disputes the fact that Matthew and Luke used Mark as their foundational source.

As for the Isaiah passages in the Book of Mormon, they actually constitute further evidence of the Nephite record's authenticity. It should be remembered that the Book of Mormon authors had access to the Brass Plates, which contained the book of Isaiah. LDS scholars like Sidney Sperry and John Tvedtnes have convincingly demonstrated that the Nephite record quotes from an authentic ancient version of Isaiah and that this version is more accurate than the King James Isaiah (Sperry 1967:91-97; Tvedtnes 1981; 1984).

An analysis of the Book of Mormon Isaiah, observes Sperry, shows that it "hews an independent course for itself, as might be expected of a truly ancient and authentic record. It makes additions to the present [King James] text in certain places, omits material in others, transposes, makes grammatical changes, [and] finds support at times for its unusual readings in the ancient Greek, Syriac, and Latin versions . . . ." (1967:97). The Book of Mormon's version of Isaiah is also supported by Isaiah texts in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the Aramaic Targumim.

It should be pointed out that the versions of Isaiah which support the Nephite Isaiah were either unknown or unavailable to Joseph Smith in his day. Some anti-Mormons have suggested that Joseph was acquainted with the Septuagint (LXX), i.e., the Greek Old Testament. However, the prophet did not know Greek, and there is no evidence that he read or studied the Septuagint prior to the publication of the Book of Mormon. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that he did, how would Joseph Smith have known that some of the LXX's Isaiah readings were superior to those in the King James translation? And how would he have known which of the Septuagint's Isaiah readings were better than their counterparts in the KJV?

A brief word needs to be said about 3 Nephi 12-14, which closely parallels Matthew 5-7, the Sermon on the Mount. The fact that King James language appears in much of 3 Nephi's version of the Sermon is, of course, seen by critics as evidence of plagiarism. However, Welch has shown that the version of the Sermon recorded in 3 Nephi is superior in content and based on a more ancient text than the one in Matthew (Welch 1990; see also Compton).

One last point needs to be made with regard to the subject of scriptural borrowing. If a prophet is translating an earlier text of scripture, he might find places where he deems it appropriate or helpful to model the wording of a particular verse on a passage from a later scriptural source. Similarly, some translators of the Dead Sea Scroll versions of Isaiah have used King James phraseology in their renderings of certain passages, even though the Qumran documents predate the KJV.

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find potential or actual instances of this phenomenon in the Book of Mormon--such as Moroni 10: 8-17, which closely parallels 1 Corinthians 12:4-11; or Moroni 7:4546, which resembles 1 Corinthians 13:4-8. Other examples could be cited. However, in these and other similar cases, resemblance also could be the result of the use of an earlier, independent source on the part of the Bible and Book of Mormon writers (Sperry 1967:113-121; Nibley 1989: 88-90, 216).

The case of 3 Nephi 20:23-26 warrants separate examination. Anti- Mormons see a major problem here because this section parallels both Acts 3:22-26 and Deuteronomy 15:18-19. But the passage from Acts is merely Peter's paraphrase of the verses from Deuteronomy. The section from 3 Nephi follows Peter's wording more than Moses'. Therefore, it could be that Joseph Smith simply preferred Peter's phraseology to Moses'.

Again, we should not be at all surprised to find examples of this sort of biblical usage in the Book of Mormon. Sperry had some cogent things to say on this point:

In considering the Book of Mormon we have to take the translator into account. When the prophet Joseph Smith came to a passage which contained statements which reminded him of similar ones in the New Testament, he was doubtless influenced by their wording and used them whenever it was possible to do so. (1967:121)

As has been mentioned, those who expound the environmental theory produce parallels between the Book of Mormon and various pre-1830 sources; they then point to the parallels as evidence that Joseph Smith borrowed from those sources (Marquardt; Walters; Vogel; Hougey; Jonas; Tanner 63-72, 81-88).

However, simply producing parallels between an alleged ancient document and later sources does not automatically impugn the former. Parallels between two texts can be due to more than just plagiarism. Some or all of the parallels can be coincidental. Since history and literature are sometimes remarkably repetitive, the possibility of chance resemblance is not always far-fetched, even when the parallels are close.

Or, the parallels might be the result of both texts' discussing the same subject matter. For example, if Text A and Text B are both talking about the same incident, area, or culture, then one would naturally expect to find some parallels between the two works. The same would be true if both texts were making use of a common source.

More factors can come into play when you're dealing with an ancient text that has been translated for an entirely different culture than the one in and for which it was originally written. For example, translators will often employ phrases and images familiar to their contemporary reading audience to express the ideas they encounter in the document. Naturally, the presence of these "modern" phrases and images would not invalidate the translation, much less the ancient text on which it was based.

When analyzing parallels between a particular source and scripture, it should be remembered that the Bible prophets sometimes borrowed from, or used as their reference point, pagan religious and historical texts to express sacred truth.

We should also bear in mind the explanation offered by the early Christian apologist Justin Martyr for the resemblances between some pagan and Christian rites: Satanic copying designed to create doubt about the Christian faith.

All of this is to say that the mere existence of parallels between the Book of Mormon and this or that nineteenth-century source does not automatically impugn the Nephite record.

Actually, Book of Mormon critics should not even want to bother looking for nineteenth-century parallels since the Nephite record claims to have been written in a period and area about which next to nothing was known in Joseph Smith's day. Therefore, the Nephite text is a prime target for rigorous proper testing.

The Book of Mormon claims to have been written and compiled in the New World from around 2850 B.C. to A.D. 421. It also claims to contain a good deal of information about the ancient Near East, since the people in the book migrated to the Americas from that region. As for the book's New World setting, mention has already been made of the fact that the only area in the Americas which matches the region described in the Nephite record is Mesoamerica. In Joseph Smith's day, almost nothing was known about life in ancient Mesoamerica during Book of Mormon times (ca. the Preclassic and Protoclassic periods) . And in the early 1800s, relatively little was known about the ancient Near East. Therefore, if a large number of ancient Mesoamerican and Near Eastern elements could be identified in the Nephite record, this would constitute powerful evidence of the book's authenticity. Conversely, the absence of such traits would be strong evidence against the record's veracity.

Notwithstanding this rather obvious fact, anti-Mormons have shown little interest in testing the Book of Mormon against the ancient origin and background claimed for it. For all his errors and outdated information, at least Gordon Fraser took a shot at testing the Nephite record in this manner. Most anti-LDS critics prefer to attack the book by trying to find 19th-century parallels to it.

The vast majority of such "parallels" produced by the critics are so general in nature that they lack credibility. For instance, one critic, H. Michael Marquardt, cites as parallels "money digging and slippery treasures," a "belief that the current Christian churches were corrupt," and an "interest in the origin and history of the American Indians" (Marquardt 118-123) . These can hardly be called "close" by any normal definition of the word.

Stories about "money digging and slippery treasures" have appeared in scores of books from many parts of the world from very early times. Furthermore, when one examines Marquardt's alleged parallel material in the Book of Mormon, it becomes apparent that he is misusing that material in an unsuccessful attempt to force a resemblance.

Regarding the statement about all Christian churches in Joseph Smith's day being corrupt, by the early 1800s, the belief that true, apostolic Christianity had ceased to exist on the earth and that traditional Christendom was in very bad shape had long since been expressed by many groups and persons, including Martin Luther and Roger Williams (Scharffs 293-296). And, since there is a considerable amount of evidence that the Savior's true church was taken from the earth shortly after the death of the apostles, how can the Book of Mormon be impugned for containing ancient prophecies of the church's falling away and of the corrupt state of Christendom in subsequent generations?

As for "an interest in the origin and history of the American Indians," our critic simply must be kidding! People naturally have an interest in the origin and history of those who lived before them. So what? The Hebrew prophets expressed the same interest with regard to their ancestors. Do we reject the Old Testament because contemporary and previous pagan writers also expressed an interest in the origin and history of their forefathers? Does the fact that there was an intense interest in the coming of the Messiah in Palestine prior to Jesus' birth somehow prove the New Testament to be false because it too expresses an interest in the subject?

Anti-LDS critics point out that some pre-1830 writers speculated that there were once two principal Indian nations, one peaceful and cultured and the other savage and warlike, and that the savage nation eliminated the peaceful one. Anti-Mormon writer Dan Vogel goes to great lengths to document this speculation and then later compares it with the Book of Mormon's portrayal of the Nephites and the Lamanites (61-63, 65-66). Again, what kind of a "parallel" is this? There have been many cases over the course of world history where a barbaric nation has overrun or destroyed a more peaceful, civilized one.

One major problem with Vogel's comparison is that the nations discussed in his pre-1830 sources were thought to have lived in North America and to postdate the Book of Mormon period. Furthermore, even assuming that Joseph Smith read all of the sources Vogel cites (though Vogel presents no evidence to this effect), how would the Prophet have known that in ancient Mesoamerica there were two nations similar to the ones described above and that the savage nation eventually destroyed the more civilized one? What about the archaeological and geographical evidence of the last great battles recorded in the Book of Mormon (Sorenson 1985:335-353; Palmer 1981:200-213; Allen 80-82)? How can any real or imagined nineteenth-century "parallel" explain this evidence? Another "parallel" frequently cited by the critics is the assertion found in some books available in the early 1800s that the American Indians were descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel. This belief was expressed by such writers as James Adair, Elias Boudinot, and, of course, Ethan Smith. "Therefore," as the argument goes, "this represents the same basic idea contained in the Book of Mormon: the Indians are really Israelites." Of course, as was noted earlier, the Nephite record does not pretend to speak about all of the ancient inhabitants of the New World, nor does it assert that the civilizations it discusses came from the lost ten tribes.

However, let us grant that some writers prior to and in Joseph Smith's day believed the Indians were in some way descended from the Hebrews. What does this really prove? Actually, it proves nothing. This very general parallel is only "evidence" against the Book of Mormon to those who have already decided that the book is a nineteenth-century work of fiction and who refuse to test it against its own purported origin and background.

One wonders what our critics would be saying if the following scenario had occurred in 1830: Let's suppose that a team of archaeologists, while digging in, let's say, Maryland, unearthed and subsequently translated an ancient text which told of a group of Israelites coming to the New World by ship in pre-Columbian times. Just as the translation was completed, the ancient text was stolen or inadvertently destroyed. However the archaeologists produced the translation and vouched for the existence of the original record. Would our critics therefore automatically label the translation a fraud? Would they automatically assert that its translators borrowed from the writings of Adair, Boudinot, and others, simply because it expressed the idea that some of the ancestors of the American Indians were Hebrews of some sorts?

Do our critics reject the New Testament because there were ancient pagan cults, some of them pre-Mosaic, which believed in a savior-god whose birth would be miraculous, who would be killed, and who would come back to life (Jackson 39-118)? After all, here was an important "general idea"! Similarly, first-century Palestine was rife with Messianic speculation. Does this mean that the New Testament authors simply made up their accounts of the Messiah by "borrowing" from this "same general idea"?

The one possibility for which anti-Mormons won't allow is that writers like Adair and Boudinot were correct in so far as they postulated some sort of ancient Hebrew presence in the western hemisphere, and that the Book of Mormon is an authentic account of two ancient Mesoamerican civilizations whose ancestors came from the Near East.

Using the loose, uncritical comparative method employed by so many anti-Mormons, one could easily and quickly "disprove" the Bible's authenticity (cf. Jackson; Kuhn; Frazer; Weigall). Scholars have identified hundreds of striking parallels between the Old Testament and numerous earlier pagan texts. Likewise, numerous parallels between the New Testament and earlier pagan and rabbinic sources have also been documented. What follows is only a small sampling of these similarities.

Job 38:8-11 discusses the subduing of the sea (yam) by Yahweh, who is frequently depicted as a storm-god in the Old Testament. This passage bears a marked resemblance to an Ugaritic account of the subduing of the sea-god Yamm by the Canaanite storm-god Baal (Mullen 57). In both texts, the restriction of "Sea" within certain limits by a storm-god "constitutes the initial stage of creation" (Mullen 57; see also Pope 288-296).

In fact, the Old Testament as a whole contains numerous references to a sea-god who had to be defeated in order for the creation to proceed (Wakeman; Day). This theme was common in the pagan literature of the ancient Near East.

Returning to the book of Job for a moment, Marvin Pope observes that "Mesopotamian parallels to Job have continued to increase since the early days of the recovery and interpretation of cuneiform documents" (xxxiii). Pope continues:

The first composition to be recognized as a parallel to the Book of Job was the text entitled "I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom" . . . which became widely known as the "Babylonian Job". . . .

A Sumerian text dealing with the same problem as the biblical Book of Job has been pieced together by S.N. Kramer from fragments that long had lain unrecognized in museums thousands of miles apart. This Sumerian version of the Job motif is not very similar to the so-called "Babylonian Job," but is as close to the latter to the biblical Job. (Pope xxxiii-xxxiv)

However, the best-known parallel to Job is the text entitled "I Will Praise the Lord of Wisdom," commonly referred to among scholars as "the Babylonian Job." This text and the biblical book of Job have a number of details and themes in common (Pope lxi-lxiv) . In both accounts, a prominent personage, known for humility and righteousness, is suddenly stricken with disease. Both victims, to varying degrees, question divine justice. Both give long and gory descriptions of their ailments. And both are finally restored to health.

The date of the composition of the book of Job is still debated. Some have suggested the book might have been written as early as the fifteenth century B.C. However, most Bible scholars believe Job was composed between the eighth and fourth centuries B.C. As for the Babylonian Job, it was composed in Cassite times, or around 1600 to 1150 B.C. (Pope xxxiii). The Sumerian Job poem recovered by Kramer dates from around 1700 B.C., "but it is likely that it derives from a composition as early as the Third Dynasty of Ur, ca. 2000 B.C." (Pope xxxiv).

The book of Proverbs contains numerous passages which resemble sayings found in Egyptian wisdom texts. For example, Proverbs 22:17-24:22 has long been regarded as dependent on an earlier Egyptian work, the Wisdom of Amen-em-ope (also Amenophis or Amenemopet). Even the conservative Harrison, although he limits the parallel section from Proverbs to 22 :17-23 :14, cautiously states "that there is a general connection between this portion of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Amenophis is scarcely in dispute" (1969:1015). R. B. Y. Scott notes that there are "striking similarities" between Proverbs 22:17-24:22 and Amenophis (20). "There is," he continues, "similarity in structure, and also in subject matter" (20) . John E. Alsup agrees, declaring, "this section [Proverbs 22:17-24:22] betrays an awareness of the teaching of the famous Egyptian sage Amenemopet" (831). Charles Aling is even more explicit, although he, like Harrison, limits the section from Proverbs to 22:17-23:14. Says Aling, "Another section of Proverbs derived from an Egyptian original is Proverbs 22:17-23 :14. This portion of Scripture contains close paraphrases of many of the maxims found in a late-Nineteenth-Dynasty version of the 'Wisdom of Amenemope,' which itself originated in the Eighteenth Dynasty" (127).

Harrison attempts to explain the many similarities between the two texts by suggesting that "both Proverbs and Amenophis may well have borrowed independently from some already extant Semitic source" (1969:1015). Harrison is an outstanding scholar, but in this instance the evidence appears to be against him. The view that an earlier Semitic original lay behind Proverbs and Amenophis has been successfully rebutted; in fact, it was refuted years before Harrison repeated it (Williams 1961; Aling 127 n 11). However, it is true that some of the parallels between the Bible and other texts are the result of independent borrowing from older material.

A number of Jesus' sayings in the Gospel of Matthew bear a noticeable resemblance to earlier rabbinical writings. Here are a few examples (taken from Vestal and Wallace 39):

Jesus: "Ye are the salt of the earth: But if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" (Matthew 5:13)

Source: "Salt if it has lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted?" (Bechoroth 8b)

Jesus: "But I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her committeth adultery." (Matthew 5:28)

Source: "Whosoever looketh on the little finger of a woman with a lustful eye is considered as having committed adultery." (Berachoth 24a)

Jesus: "With what measure ye mete, it shall be measured unto you." (Matthew 7:2)

Source: "With the measure with which one measures, it will be measured unto him." (Mishnah Sota 1:7)

Jesus: "Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: For this is the Law and the Prophets." (Matthew 7:12)

Source: "What is hateful to thee do it not unto thy neighbor. This is the whole Law and the rest is interpretation. Go and learn!" (Sabbath 31a)

Jesus: "For whosoever exalteth himself shall be humbled; and he that humbleth himself shall be exalted." (Matthew 23:12)

Source: "Him who humbles himself God will exalt, him who exalts himself God will humble." (Erubin 13b)

It should be observed that there are also differences between the biblical books and the pagan and rabbinic sources discussed above. There are even more differences between the Book of Mormon and VOTH. And yet, that doesn't stop anti-Mormons from continuing to claim that Ethan Smith's work was the "foundational source" for the Nephite record.

Just to show that even the existence of close parallels between two texts doesn't always prove a connection, let's briefly consider the striking similarities between Job and the earlier Indian story of Hariscandra, which first appeared in the Markandeya Purana. In this account, among the deities at an assembly of the god Indra a discussion arose as to whether there was a perfectly righteous man on earth. (Although the subject is beyond the scope of our present discussion, I should mention the well-known fact that the book of Job contains several references to a divine assembly of heavenly deities [Pope xxxvii, 9-11, 37, 112, 115; Mullen 195, 231, 275].) Most of the gods at Indra's assembly doubted that such a person existed, but the goddess Vasishta nominated a certain king Hariscandra for this honor. The god Shiva doubted that Vasishta's candidate could qualify and tested him with a series of calamities like Job's. The king's wealth, his kingdom, and his wife and only son were all taken from him, but he preserved his piety and was at last restored and rewarded (Pope lxix). Despite the obvious similarities between this account and Job, "direct interdependence" between the two is "unlikely" (Pope lxix). Harrison agrees, and points to the probability that the Indian story is a late corruption "of much earlier Mesopotamian material" (1969:1026-1027).

None of the above pagan and rabbinic parallels to the Bible should cause anyone to doubt the Bible's inspiration and authenticity. Among other things, these similarities simply evidence the fact that the biblical authors sometimes drew upon the literature of their cultural environment when composing holy scripture. In summary, R. F. Smith (who, again, is not LDS) is certainly correct when he says the following:

Ever since the appearance of the Book of Mormon, individuals have been pointing out various types of similarities between that book and the published and unpublished sources contemporary with Joseph Smith....

What is needed is the dispassionate admission that an assault upon the Book of Mormon on that basis is equally dangerous to the integrity of the Bible as Holy Writ, and vice-versa. Expediency is the name of this odious and hypocritical double standard of judgment, and I have shown elsewhere in some detail that the types and numbers of "problems" one finds in the Book of Mormon are dwarfed into insignificance by the broad spectrum of "problems" which one finds in the Bible. (1987:165)

As I have mentioned previously, the best, most effective way to test an alleged ancient document is to examine it in light of the origin and background claimed for it.

Numerous tests or criteria have been established for determining the authenticity of an alleged ancient text. These tests have been discussed and utilized by such outstanding scholars as William F. Albright (62-63), M. Smith (1973), Bruce Metzger (1972:3-24), John Warwick Montgomery (1640), Kenneth Kitchen (28-34), J. Lieblein (8), and many others (R.F. Smith 1974; Nibley 1952:1-3; 1976:5-6). What are some of these criteria? Here are a few of them:

1. Does the alleged ancient text correctly reflect the cultural environment and religious and social ideas and practices of the time?

2. Are its proper names convincing?

3. Is the style of the book appropriate to the alleged language, time, and author or authors?

4. Does it have authentic historical and geographical background material?

5. Does it contain linguistic traits unique to the alleged period of composition?

6. Is the state of social organization presented in the book consistent with archaeological and documentary evidence concerning the alleged area, culture, and period?

These tests and others that scholars frequently employ all boil down to testing an alleged ancient document against the origin and background claimed for it. These same tests should be applied to the Book of Mormon, as Professor C. Wilfred Griggs observes:

The assumption that any parallels from the world of Joseph Smith, real or imagined, are sufficient to discredit the authenticity of the work [the Nephite record] is naive. The challenge of the Book of Mormon lies elsewhere. It claims to be an ancient book, and it must be examined and criticized in terms of its claim. Before he can disprove the antiquity of the book, the critic must analyze the historical, cultural, and social elements which are found throughout the narrative of the Book of Mormon and must show that they cannot represent the ancient world origin claimed for them.... (77)

Of course, when an alleged ancient document is being properly tested, parallels from the book's purported time and area almost always take precedence over later similarities.

For example, for many years the Gospel of John was dated to the latter half of the second century because of parallels between the book and early second-century Gnostic beliefs and sources. However, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, which provide much earlier and more convincing parallels, the later date for John has been discredited. The Qumran documents show that the supposed second-century Gnostic ideas of John's gospel are authentic to first-century Jewish sectarian life and thought.

Similarly, for quite some time many scholars dated the song of Miriam (Exodus 15) to the period subsequent to the building of the first Temple because of the reference to the "mountain of thine inheritance" (vs. 17), which was interpreted as Mount Zion. However, this objection was removed with the discovery in the Canaanite Baal Epic of the phrase "the mountain of mine inheritance," showing that the description was poetic rather than topographical . This "removes the obstacle" to dating the song of Miriam "within the Mosaic period where it properly belongs" (Harrison 1970:166).

Just how much was known about Preclassic and Protoclassic Mesoamerica in Joseph Smith's day? How much relevant information on the ancient Near East was available in the early 1800s? These are key questions, since some anti-LDS critics assert that Joseph Smith had available to him enough information on these areas to enable him to write the Book of Mormon (Vogel; Walters; Jonas). This is a rather surprising claim, since it could be seen as a tacit admission that the Nephite record contains authentic ancient information about these regions.

With the flood of evidence pointing to the Book of Mormon's ancient origin, the critics have no choice but to try to find potential alternative sources for the ancient material in the book. However, the fact of the matter is that in Joseph Smith's day practically nothing was known about Preclassic and Protoclassic Mesoamerica, and very little relevant information was available on the ancient Near East.

Eugene England has examined at length the question of what relevant material on the ancient Near East was extant in Joseph Smith's time. In his 1982 article, "Through the Arabian Desert to a Bountiful Land: Could Joseph Smith Have Known the Way?", England refutes the anti-Mormon position on the subject and demonstrates that the account of Lehi's family in the Arabian desert is loaded with ancient details which only recently have been documented. He also shows that the "information on Arabia available to Joseph Smith was vague, inaccurate, and contradictory" (147). England goes on to point out the following:

If we assume Joseph Smith is the author of this story [the Book of Mormon account of the travels of Lehi's family in the Arabian desert] he has provided us with a daring abundance of unique details about matters unknown in his time, which ought to make it a simple matter to show him factually wrong in the light of later discoveries. Most dramatic--and most easy to falsify--would be the references to campsites at specific locations capable of producing crops; the conditions near a mountainous area supporting wild game that would break a steel bow and cause others to lose their spring and yet where wood for new bows could be found; and most of all, of course, the abrupt turn in direction and travel eastward--over an unusually desolate area but directly to a remarkably fertile area (fruit, flowers, honey) on the seashore that also meets a unique combination of unusual conditions: a beach, but also cliffs from which someone could be thrown into a deep sea; ore for toolmaking; timbers of sufficient length and quality for shipbuilding; and a prevailing wind to take them toward America. But the exploration of the Arabian peninsula by Westerners, which has occurred mainly in the twentieth century, especially since the penetration of Bertram Thomas into the Empty Quarter (1920s) and Wilfred Thesiger into Dhofar, has produced no single contradiction of Joseph Smith's daringly detailed "conjectures" and most remarkably has shown a high correlation of the actual discoveries to his specific details. (149, emphasis in original)

What about the many other ancient Near Eastern elements which have been identified in the Book of Mormon by Nibley, Welch, and others? Could Joseph Smith have learned of these things through contemporary secular sources or, perhaps, from the Bible? Absolutely not. Yes, chiasmus appears in the Bible, but nobody in America knew of its existence until long after the Nephite record was published. In fact, the existence of biblical chiasmus wasn't even generally acknowledged and discussed by Bible scholars until the 1850s. Very few, if any, of the Near Eastern details Nibley has identified in the Book of Mormon could have been produced in the early 1800s, even by an expert, much less by Joseph Smith (Nibley 1976:12-24, 27-30, 45-54, 177-180, 230-242).

As for the information on Preclassic and Protoclassic Mesoamerica available prior to the publication of the Nephite record, Palmer has examined this subject in some detail, in his article "A Survey of Pre-1830 Historical Sources Relating to the Book of Mormon" (1576). I quote from his findings:

Although there were a number of romances and other less than reliable books about the natives of North America available in the pre-1830 United States, North America appears to have no connection with the area described in the Book of Mormon account. The only authoritative sources available on Mesoamerica, where the Book of Mormon story apparently evolved, were Clavijero's Ancient History of Mexico and Humboldt's Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain. Neither deals significantly or at length with the pre-400 A.D. period. (107)

Palmer is not the only scholar to point out that next to nothing was known about Preclassic and Protoclassic Mesoamerica in Joseph Smith's day. I quote Jakeman, an authority on pre-Columbian Spanish and Mesoamerican writings:

It is important to note that most of what is now known archaeologically about developments in the probable Book of Mormon area of central and southern Mexico and northern Central America . . . has come forth since the publication of the Book of Mormon account in 1830....

Although there was some historical knowledge of ancient Mesoamerica available in 1830, this was limited almost entirely to the latest pre-Spanish developments in the area: the Toltec and Aztec empires of Mexico and Late Maya kingdoms of Yucatan and Guatemala, beginning only some six centuries before the European conquest, i.e., five centuries after the Book of Mormon civilizations....

It was not until 1910 that the existence of advanced cultures in Mesoamerica before the "classic" or before A.D. 400 . . . was archaeologically established. (1963:99-100, emphasis in original)

In contrast to the above, Vogel erroneously asserts that by 1830 "knowledge of the impressive ruined cities of the Maya of Central America and the Inca of South America was commonplace in the northeastern United States" (21). This claim is not only wrong, it is downright fanciful. To support his assertion, Vogel cites a grand total of fifteen pre-1830 sources. Aside from the fact that Vogel has absolutely no evidence that Joseph Smith read or even heard of these sources, a look at the sources themselves reveals the desperate, undocumented nature of Vogel's claim. Of Vogel's fifteen sources, eight weren't even published in the United States, but in England . And two of these eight works weren't published until 1828, the same year Joseph Smith began to translate the Book of Mormon plates, which he had received in September of the previous year. Another one of Vogel's sources, an article on the "Aborigines of America" from a magazine based in Boston, wasn't published until April of 1829, nearly a year after Joseph had already started to translate the Nephite plates. Incredibly, two of Vogel's fifteen sources are Ethan Smith's View of the Hebrews and Von Humboldt's Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain! Of course, as we have already seen, these works say almost nothing about Mesoamerica during Book of Mormon times. Another two of Vogel's sources are two books which contain very brief descriptions of some Incan ruins in South America. Not only are the described ruins in the wrong area but the scanty descriptions of them are buried in the midst of a great deal of material which has nothing whatsoever to do with the ancient Americas. Not one of the sources cited by Vogel presents any substantive, detailed information on ancient Mesoamerica.

The historical record is quite clear that even nine years after the publication of the Book of Mormon, extremely little was known about Mesoamerica. There was certainly no evidence of advanced Mesoamerican civilizations such as those depicted in the Nephite record. I quote Charles Gallenkamp on the state of knowledge of the ancient New World among American and European scholars in 1839 when the explorer John Lloyd Stephens announced his intention to look for large ruins in Central America:

Not surprisingly, his plan touched off a flurry of controversy. The public's imagination, already excited by sensational archaeological discoveries in Italy, Greece, the Near East, and Egypt, was captivated by Stephens' intriguing quest. But professional historians were openly skeptical of its merits. Most scholars viewed the American Indians as having never risen above a condition of barest savagery, and the suggestion that civilizations of the highest order had once flourished in the western hemisphere was unacceptable in academic circles. At that time few systematic excavations had been carried out anywhere in America, and prevailing theories concerning its antiquities were largely based upon studies of widely scattered museum collections or pure speculation. Many important ethnohistoric documents, such as Laqnda's Relacion, still lay undiscovered in various libraries, and the eyewitness accounts of sixteenth-century Spanish explorers, who first observed the splendid achievements of the Aztecs, Maya, and Incas before their destruction, were either ignored or discounted....

The attitude of most scholars was aptly expressed by the Scottish historian William Robertson when he wrote in his widely read History of America (1777): "America was not peopled by any nation of the ancient continent, which had made considerable progress in civilization. The inhabitants of the New World were in a state of society so extremely rude as to be unacquainted with those arts which are the first essays of human ingenuity in its advance towards improvement...."

Robertson further declared that "neither the Mexicans nor Peruvians were entitled to rank with those nations which merit the name civilized." (1985:24-25, emphasis added)

In his biography of Stephens, Von Hagen provides us with an excellent picture of the generally held views on the indigenous cultures of the New World and of the information available on them in 1839--again, nine years after the Book of Mormon was published. Von Hagen writes:

The acceptance of an "Indian civilization" demanded, to an American living in 1839, an entire reorientation, for to him an Indian was one of those barbaric half-naked tepee-dwellers against whom wars were constantly waged. A rude subhuman people who hunted with the stealth of animals, they were artisans of buffalo robes, arrowheads, and spears, and little else. Nor did one ever think of calling the other indigenous inhabitants of the continent "civilized." In the universally accepted opinion, they were like their North American counterparts--savages. No one dreamed that throughout the tablelands of Mexico, in the tangled scrub jungles of Yucatan, there stood, covered by jungle verdure [vegetation], ruins of temples, acropolises, and stone causeways of a civilization as great in extent as Egypt's. The names Herman Cortes, Pizarro, Bernal Diaz del Castillo were but synonyms for rapine; "Aztec," "Maya," "Toltec," and "Inca" were in no dictionary, and in few histories. These civilizations were not only dead, for dead implied having once lived, but, even to the world immersed in searching out the antique, absolutely unknown. . . .

It was a simple bibliographic fact in 1839 that there was no literature available to the American reader on the ancient American civilizations other than those, recently published, which Stephens had read. The Mayas of Yucatan which every reader of the Hearst [newspaper] supplement knows now as well as he does the Blackfeet--had been allowed little space in the published works of the Spanish chroniclers, and their histories were in most instances secondhand. The reports on the Maya, voluminous detailed investigations made by priest and soldier, still lay unpublished in the Spanish archives, or if printed, had been issued in editions of such rarity that they were inaccessible to scholars in America. Actually, [in 1839] before one could attempt literary research on these pre-Columbian civilizations, or the history of the Conquest, one would have to create an entire manuscript library. (In F. Harris 1953:60-61, emphasis added)

This lack of knowledge about the ancient civilizations of the Americas undoubtedly explains the fact that for many years after the Book of Mormon was published, it was criticized for asserting that advanced cultures existed anciently in the New World. As late as 1860, L . A . Bertrand attacked the Nephite text for saying that any of the inhabitants of the ancient Americas had been civilized (41).

It wasn't until the late 1960s that sufficient archaeological research had been done to enable scholars to examine the causes and dynamics of the changes that occurred in ancient Mayan culture (Adams ix). In addition, almost all of the evidence "of Preclassic social complexity in the Maya lowlands" was unknown prior to the late 1950s (Adams and Culbert 15).

The plain and demonstrable fact of the matter is that the secular sources available in the early 1800s could not possibly have furnished Joseph Smith with the many ancient Mesoamerican and Near Eastern elements which have been identified in the Book of Mormon.

Any theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon which postulates Joseph Smith as the book's author collides head-on with the wordprint tests that have been done on the book by the Berkeley Group and by Larsen, Rencher, and Layton . These tests constitute an impassable roadblock for the environmental theory of the origin of the Nephite record. Since these wordprint tests are discussed in the preceding chapter, there is no need for further explanation here. Suffice it to say that verifiable wordprint measurements of the Book of Mormon have proven that Joseph Smith was not its author.

The Book of Mormon speaks of three groups of people coming by ship from the Old World to the New. Interestingly, several ancient Mesoamerican and South American texts also speak of transoceanic crossings to the New World. One Mesoamerican document, the Annals of the Cakchiquels, which didn't become generally available until 1953, even tells of a people coming from "across the sea" to a place called "Tulan," which means "abundant" or "bountiful ." One of the regions spoken of in the Book of Mormon is called the "land Bountiful" (Sorenson 1955; Jakeman 1963:178-179).

The Book of Mormon contains many authentic, complex examples of an ancient Hebraic literary form known as chiasmus (Welch 1982:33-52; Reynolds 53-74). Chiasmus is an inverted type of parallelism. A chiastic passage is one in which the second part is inverted and balanced against the first--in other words, a statement containing two or more parts followed by a restatement in reverse order.

Since there is no evidence that anyone in America understood chiasmus in 1830 (the year the Book of Mormon was published), the remarkable presence of complex chiasms in the book is strong evidence of the record's authenticity. No complex chiasms appear in Solomon Spaulding's Manuscript Story (hereafter cited as MS), nor do any appear in View of the Hebrews.

Vernal Holley claims to have found chiasmus in MS (26-27), but none of his alleged chasms is authentic; all of them are forced and taken out of context.

There are several rules for identifying authentic chiastic passages (Welch 1982:39, 52; 1989). One, the center of the alleged chiastic passage must always be the turning point. Two, the identical ideas of the passage will often be distributed so as to occur at the beginning, middle, and end of the chiasm, but nowhere else. Three, there will often be a mixture of directly parallel and inverted parallel lines in the same unit. Four, the chiasm will be relatively self-evident, encompassing a complete literary unit within the text, and not forced upon a partial passage artificially. Five, a chiasm will generally not occur where other organizing schemes are present. Six, the chiasm should take into account every predominant word or thought in the unit, and similarly should not rely upon insignificant or dispensable parts of speech.

None of Holley's handful of alleged chasms satisfies even one of these chiastic requirements. MS does not contain authentic, complex chiasmus.

Another ancient literary form, known as epanalepsis, can also be found in the Book of Mormon (Childs). Epanalepsis occurs when an author repeats certain words in the course of a lengthy sentence, to pick up a previous train of thought after a parenthetical aside or other diversion, repeating certain words to remind the reader of the original idea of the sentence. This technique is sometimes called "resumptive repetition." Ancient authors apparently found it useful to employ epanalepsis since they did not have the benefit of modern punctuation or paragraphing. The presence of epanalepsis in the Book of Mormon is yet another evidence of the record's authenticity. Epanalepsis does not appear in MS, nor in VOTH.

The Book of Mormon displays a knowledge of an ancient type of spatial organization known as cosmic urban symbolism (Olsen). Cosmic urban symbolism has been documented in several ancient civilizations. It first appeared in the ancient Near East. This symbolism was based on the belief that the perceived order of territorial environment, in its natural and built-up features, revealed the structure of a sacred universe. The epitome of this symbolic order was a capital city or ceremonial center, which would be viewed as a reduced version of the cosmos. The specific features of this ancient model of spatial organization can generally be expressed in terms of three principles: centripetality, cardinality, and inductance (Olsen 80-81).

The existence of cosmic urban symbolism was unknown in Europe and America at the time the Book of Mormon was published. Concerning cosmic urban symbolism in the Nephite record, Steven Olsen says the following:

Cosmic urban symbolism affects every aspect of society and culture in the Book of Mormon, from the universal to the mundane, from the immediate to the eternal. It provides a broadly based and compelling connection between the Book of Mormon and the civilizations of the ancient world. (92)

Cosmic urban symbolism does not appear in MS, nor does it appear in VOTH.

And then there is the matter of computer wordprints and the Book of Mormon. What is a wordprint test? Basically, a computer wordprint test consists of determining the subconscious patterns of non-contextual word usage on the part of an author. We all use non-contextual words, like "the ' "and ' "of ' etc., in ways that uniquely characterize our writing. These patterns cannot be imitated. A computer wordprint test can identify these patterns in an author's writings. Scholars have used wordprint tests to detect ghost writers. No ghost writer has ever fooled a wordprint test. Wordprint tests have also been successfully used in cases where a book's authorship has been disputed. Studies have shown that wordprints can survive the translation process.

The first substantive wordprint tests done on the Book of Mormon were performed in 1980 by Wayne Larsen, Alvin Rencher, and Tim Layton, all of whom are experts in statistics. Utilizing computers, these scholars conducted three types of tests on the Nephite record: MANOVA (Multivariate Analysis of Variance), Cluster Analysis, and Discriminant Analysis. The three most important results of these tests were (1) that the Book of Mormon was written by many different authors, exactly as it claims; (2) that Joseph Smith did not write the Book of Mormon; and (3) that the wordprints of the Nephite writers and those of Solomon Spaulding do not match (Larsen, Rencher, and Layton; Larsen and Rencher).

Shortly after the Larsen-Rencher-Layton test results were published, a group of scientists, now known as the Berkeley Group, began their own wordprint project. This group was composed of several non-Mormon experts and one LDS scholar, John Hilton, an adjunct professor in the statistics department at Brigham Young University. The group's goals were to verify the accuracy of wordprinting and to check the results of the Larsen-Rencher-Layton results.

The tests conducted by the Berkeley Group were even more conservative and rigorous than those done by Larsen, Rencher, and Layton. They incorporated six points which were not used in earlier Book of Mormon wordprint studies, such as the development of a "wrap-around" word-group counting method to help break apart clusters of similar words, and the use of the earliest Book of Mormon manuscripts. The Berkeley Group compared the two Nephite authors who have the largest number of 5000-word texts, Nephi and Alma. The group selected and analyzed three independent writings of these two authors. The wordprints in these writings were also measured against the wordprints of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and Solomon Spaulding. After years of research and testing, a brief paper describing the Berkeley test results was published in 1987. A more detailed article on the results appeared in the Summer 1990 issue of Brigham Young University Studies. Like the Larsen-Rencher-Layton wordprint study, the Berkeley tests deal a fatal blow to the Spaulding theory; they also refute the idea that Joseph Smith was the author of the Nephite record (J. Hilton). I quote from Hilton's report on the Berkeley Group's test results:

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. Additionally these two Book of Mormon writers have wordprints unique to themselves and measure statistically independent from each other in the same fashion that other uncontested authors do. Therefore, the Book of Mormon measures multiauthored, with authorship consistent to its own internal claims. (J. Hilton 101)

The environmental theory of the origin of the Book of Mormon is completely untenable. It is based on extremely questionable, and very inconclusive methodology, and it does not, and cannot, account for the ancient elements in the Nephite record.

In light of all the evidence, the most, if not the only, plausible explanation for the origin of the Nephite text is the one given by Joseph Smith: that he translated it from ancient plates "by the gift and power of God."

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Michael T. Griffith holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Excelsior College in Albany, New York, and two Associate in Applied Science degrees from the Community College of the Air Force. He is a two-time graduate of the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and of the U.S. Air Force Technical Training School in San Angelo, Texas. He is the author of four books on Mormonism and ancient texts. He has completed advanced Hebrew programs at Haifa University in Israel and at the Spiro Institute in London, England. While at Brigham Young University, he was a research assistant for Dr. Ross T. Christensen of the Society for Early Historic Archaeology. His published works on gospel subjects include Refuting the Critics (Bountiful, Utah: Horizon Publishers, 1992) and A Ready Reply: Answering Challenging Questions About the Gospel (Horizon Publishers, 1994), and One Lord, One Faith: Writings of the Early Christian Fathers as Evidences of the Restoration (Horizon Publishers, 1996).

*** One Lord, One Faith can be purchased or ordered from your local LDS bookstore, or you can order it directly from Horizon Publishers via their toll-free number 1-866-818-6277. One Lord, One Faith documents dozens of parallels between Mormonism and ancient Christianity and is an excellent book for investigators and members alike. It is also an excellent companion book to the famous talk tape "The 17 Points of the True Church." If you'd like to order the book online, click here.