Aural and Oral: The Raw Book of Mormon as Dictated By Joseph Smith

When I first examined the published text from the Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon, I was embarrassed at all the non-standard grammar. But now I find it to be a fascinating glimpse into the miracle of the translation process, looking at the raw language that was dictated, hour after hour, as Joseph sought inspiration as he shut out his surroundings and stared at some kind of tangible aid, a seerstone, held inside a hat.

The bad grammar issue is becoming a puzzling but fascinating topic for further research as we learn that almost everything that offends us as bad grammar, much of which Joseph and others edited out of the text later to be more standard English, turns out to be acceptable grammar in Early Modern English, especially in the years just before the KJV. That’s right: the English of the Book of Mormon shows a strong pre-KJV and non-KJV influence that, based on the data, cannot be easily explained by Joseph just imitating the KJV. The reasons for this and its implications are not the focus of this post, though I will mention that Stanford Carmack has just added two more strong article giving further evidence for the role of Early Modern English in the Book of Mormon. See “Joseph Smith Read the Words” and “The More Part of the Book of Mormon Is Early Modern English,” wherein Carmack examines another unusual English construct that distinguishes the Book of Mormon from both the Bible and apparently American dialects, as far as we know.

Still struggling to leave this tangent! But let me first mention that the case for strong Early Modern English influence in the original dictated language of the Book of Mormon is not driven by any kind of apologetic agenda, but by the data. Skousen and Carmack are examining surprising elements in the data and following the data through meticulous investigation. The data is pointing somewhere, somewhere interesting but perplexing. Let’s see where it leads. I was quite skeptical when I first heard the argument, but I’ve looked at the data and have examined other hypotheses, such as the possibility of Yankee dialect having artifacts that would give rise to the textual surprises pointing to EModE influence. I’ve also looked at other examples of Joseph Smith’s writing, such as in the 1835 Book of Commandments, to find evidence that EModE elements in the Book of Mormon was his natural language. You can roll your eyes all you want, but I challenge you to dig into the data and give me a better explanation for the network of evidence Carmack has been uncovering from many different angles. Something interesting is going on in the original text that Joseph dictated. Carmack sometimes states things more strongly or with more of an edge than I would, but I think his work is excellent and demands more careful, thoughtful consideration. Too often it is simply ignored as people say, “What? Why would God use Early Modern English? That makes no sense.” The most exciting discoveries in life come when the data points to something that makes no sense in light of our old paradigms. Shaking up old, inaccurate paradigms for more accurate ones can be disorienting and painful, but it’s also exciting. It’s progress. So let’s see where the data actually leads. If it eventually points to nothing more than Joseph’s own outlier dialect of English coupled with some lucky, natural deviations in grammar inspired by the KJV and other sources, it might actually be a relief. Easier to deal with, at least.

Now to today’s actual post. Exploring the words of the Original Manuscript and especially Skousen’s Earliest Text no longer embarrasses me. Instead, I am thrilled at the echo of Joseph’s voice as he dictated raw text not taken from a carefully prepared manuscript from some scholarly collaborator or committee of technical advisors and ghost writers, but from inspiration as he shut out the world and transmuted text from gold plates into ink and paper laden with a treasure in archaic English. Numerous witnesses of this rapid translation work, including at least one non-LDS witness, consistently described what happened and make it clear that the process involved oral dictation that was copied by a scribe.

Joseph was not using a manuscript. He dictated text and the scribe wrote it down. That became the Original Manuscript. It was then copied and delivered to the printer. Remnants of these manuscripts today clearly witness to the reality of these processes, with abundant evidence that the Original Manuscript was the result of scribes hearing words and writing them down, while the Printer’s Manuscript shows evidence of scribes seeing words (on the Original Manuscript) and copying them down. This evidence has been discussed in many of the works of Royal Skousen, such as his “How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript.” For example, there are many cases where we can see scribal mistakes due to mishearing the spoken text. One example from Skousen:

 In 1 Nephi 13:29 of the original manuscript the scribe (not yet identified, but designated as scribe 2) wrote down the following: 

& because of these things which are taken away out of the gosple of the Lamb & exceeding great many do stumble 

Obviously, scribe 2 misheard “an exceeding great many” as “and exceeding great many”. The scribe’s use of the ampersand (&) shows that the error was not based on visual similarity. Hearing an, the scribe interpreted it as the casual speech form an’  for and.

Other interesting changes can be seen in the Appendix of The Earliest Text giving “Significant Textual Changes.” For example, when Nephi quoted Isaiah 14:19 in 2 Nephi 24:19, Isaiah’s “raiment of those that are slain” apparently was misheard and was written as the “remnant of those that are slain.” A natural aural mistake for someone writing oral diction. “I have removed the borders” in Isaiah 10:13 became “moved the borders” in Nephi’s quotation in 2 Nephi 20:13. “Found the kingdoms” in Isaiah 10:10 became “founded the kingdoms” in 2 Nephi 20:10. Likewise Ramah from Isaiah 10:29 became Ramath in 2 Nephi 20:29. These are examples of apparent errors that entered into the early Book of Mormon manuscripts that were or, in some cases, may still be in need of correction. These kind of errors from the aural and oral nature of the Book of Mormon translation process don’t just occur in quotations from the Bible, of course. They are found throughout the text, but I think their presence in the Isaiah passages are significant because it reminds us that even the Isaiah passages weren’t created by just dragging out a Bible and copying from it (related: “Did Joseph Use a Bible?“). Those passages were probably also dictated. And as far as we know, based on what multiple witnesses saw and based on the evidence we can see in the Original Manuscript and Printer’s Manuscript, the text was dictated and recorded by scribes. Nobody saw a manuscript that Joseph used. Nobody saw a Bible that he pulled out when it was time for Bible quotes. It looks like that oral dictation process was in use steadily.

If there was a time when a Bible was used to simplify the translation work, I would guess that it would be for Isaiah 4 through 9 quoted in 2 Nephi 14 through 19, where Skousen’s list of significant changes in the Appendix shows a gap, while there seem to be periodic changes in the chapters before and after due to possible scribal errors. That could be because a more careful and accurate scribe was used during those chapters, or for other reasons. (I also think this section probably isn’t covered in what we have left of the Original Manuscript, though I haven’t checked yet.)

On the other hand, whether there are scribal errors or not, there are numerous other apparently intentional changes in the Book of Mormon’s quotations from Isaiah and other parts of the Bible. Some are subtle, such as the recently discovered Hebraism in 2 Nephi 12:2 as it quotes Isaiah 2:2 One little word is changed as that becomes when, but in so doing, significant meaning is added in the process as an interesting Hebraism is introduced in a way that is relevant to the Restoration. Subtle, but cool. See Paul Hoskisson, “Was Joseph Smith Smarter Than the Average Fourth Year Hebrew Student? Finding a Restoration-Significant Hebraism in Book of Mormon Isaiah” at Mormon Interpreter.

And yet, of course, there are still problems. The text quoted seems to follow the KJV when it is good enough, and “good enough” includes errors (generally of no doctrinal significance) in the KJV that some folks insist should have been fixed if Joseph really was inspired. I’m all for total perfection, even in details that don’t really matter,  and often demand it in others. Fortunately it’s not part of my set of expectations for the Book of Mormon. Human errors have not been completely excised, whether they are errors from Nephite writers, Joseph Smith, scribes, typesetters, or, whoever else had a hand in the Book of Mormon and its translation, including whoever is responsible for those puzzling Early Modern English elements. Stay tuned, and keep your paradigms ready to roll.

Author: Jeff Lindsay

66 thoughts on “Aural and Oral: The Raw Book of Mormon as Dictated By Joseph Smith

  1. I appreciate the kind of argument being made here. A scribe who wrote "and" might perhaps have intended to write "an" but made a slip of the pen. If the scribe wrote an ampersand, though, then it does seem unlikely that they intended to write "an".

    And it also seems at least somewhat unlikely that a scribe would write an ampersand if they had a clearly printed text in front of them, which they were for some reason copying. Not impossible, though; I've made some bizarre typos myself, in copying text quickly. And of course if the scribe were copying some bad handwriting, then misreading "an" as "and" could be quite possible, especially if using "many" as a noun was unusual in the scribe's own dialect.

    So if this ampersand example is typical of Skousen's evidence for dictation, then I acknowledge that he has some evidence; but I wouldn't call that evidence compelling.

    As to the grammar: Jeff, conspicuous by its absence in the list of hypotheses you consider is the very one that occurred to me immediately and spontaneously when I first read the Book of Mormon. Namely, that the writer was trying to sound like the King James Bible, but clumsily overdoing the archaic turns of phrase.

    Have you considered this possibility seriously? It is admittedly impious, since if it doesn't directly imply fraud, it sure suggests it. But to me it seems to be a theory that is all too effortlessly self-consistent, whereas the notion that God picked Early Modern English as the target grammar (but not lexicon!) for an 1830 translation of ancient Hebrew … seems bizarre.

  2. Just to show that I really do just find the overdone archaism hypothesis to be easily plausible, and am not simply trying to shoot down this latest Mormon apologetic balloon, I can offer what seems to me to be one possible explanation why God actually might have inspired a translation in archaic grammar. That would be if the original text had for some reason been written in a Hebrew grammar that was archaic for its (Nephite) time. In such a case, English that was archaic in 1830 might have been the most accurate translation of the original authors' style.

    Why would the Nephite authors have used Hebrew grammar that was archaic in their day? Well, maybe they were scholars, literate in Biblical Hebrew, and in their own writing they were harking back to the outmoded Hebrew of the Old World, while the daily dialect of their contemporaries had changed a lot in the New World. That's not so implausible to me.

    Accurately translating archaism into archaism is pretty tricky for human translators. I've read an English translation of a German novel in which one modern character's lapse into old-fashioned German is represented in English by having the character say "murther" for "murder", and a few other such oddities. But one might well imagine that a divine translation would be distinguished by effortlessly nailing things that few human translators would attempt.

    This is not going to be a convincing sign to non-Mormons that the Book of Mormon must have been divinely inspired, because of course the notion that the original Hebrew was archaic is pure speculation, plausible or not, and the alternative that Joseph Smith overdid his fake archaism seems most plausible of all. But for Mormons who are committed to divine inspiration, the archaism-for-archaism scenario would seem to me to be a plausible explanation for why God might use Early Modern grammar.

  3. And in fact the idea that God had made a point of preserving Nephite archaisms in the English translation might have theological implications that would resonate for Mormons. It would say that the Nephite authors of the Book of Mormon were trying, even in their grammar, to be faithful to an old tradition that was lapsing in the society around them. And it would say that God considered this fact to be part of their record — a part important enough to be preserved, in the translation, even at some cost in readability. That would show a certain interest and concern, on God's part, for details of how human beings express themselves. And a certain respect, on God's part, for human efforts to be faithful, even in small things.

    I mean those musings sincerely; I promise they're not some kind of satirical theory designed to mock or embarrass Mormons. I myself am only entertaining them hypothetically, however. I'm playing Joseph's Advocate, as it were.

  4. "…the alternative that Joseph Smith overdid his fake archaism seems most plausible of all."

    I don't follow that at all. I haven't seen any examples of eModE grammar that anyone could guess, let alone produce a consistent pattern of guessing right. If he were guessing, he would likely have gotten most of it wrong. And where would he have learned it? As Emma said, he couldn't even dictate a proper letter.

  5. Nobody is suggesting that Joseph Smith intended to produce Early Modern English grammar. The overdone archaism hypothesis is that he intended to produce King James Bible English, but failed to nail it. He wasn't a linguist, and the style he used was really just his own best guess at what King James Bible English was supposed to be. It turned out that his guess was a bit off.

    Smith was pretty familiar with the King James Bible, so his guess wasn't too ridiculously off. For a hundred and fifty years, most people accepted the Book of Mormon English as a version of King James Bible English, albeit perhaps corrupted with rural New England dialect.

    When you look as carefully as Skousen and Carmack have looked, however, you can see that Smith's guess wasn't perfect. Attempting to speak in an older dialect than his own native dialect, he overshot. At least in the respects that Stanford Carmack has measured, Smith's guess at King James English is actually closer to Early Modern English.

    To suppose that this match with EModE is a remarkable thing, which must be hard to explain except by miracle, is just another Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy. Smith's guess at KJBE was off; it was over-archaic. It could have been less over-archaic, in which case Carmack would have found a match with somewhat later English. Or it could have been more over-archaic, and Carmack would have matched it to earlier English. In whichever way Smith's guess was off, Carmack would have matched it to some earlier dialect. The Texas sharpshooter only has to hit the barn. Wherever his bullet lands, Carmack will paint a bullseye around it, and call it a miracle.

    So Joseph Smith didn't ever have to have learned Early Modern English! He wasn't really speaking EModE at all (as is obvious from the Book of Mormon's vocabulary and spelling, which is not remotely like EModE). It's only Carmack's methodology that classifies Smith's overdone archaism as Early Modern English grammar.

  6. Emma Smith's statements about her husband's inability to dictate are of no value whatever as evidence against fraud hypotheses. She was his wife; she stayed with him for years as he built up Mormonism; she was one of the Book of Mormon scribes. If Joseph committed fraud, then Emma was almost certainly in on it.

    Other evidence of Joseph Smith's verbal fluency is abundant. He was a preacher. In a culture where preaching was a highly respected profession, he could not possibly have built up Mormonism as he did, unless he was a rather good preacher.

  7. It's unclear to me how solid Skousen's and Carmack's evidence really is. They do not have sufficient authority for me to accept their claims without dispute: they have some relevant academic credentials, but they are neither of them experts in dating English texts by grammatical patterns; and their work has not been published in any reputable linguistics journals. Their credentials are real, but their claims are much larger than their credentials alone can support.

    To claim that a text was written in a certain dialect, it is far from enough merely to produce some matching frequency patterns. One crucial additional issue occurs to me, just as an amateur; real experts will surely have a longer list of essential questions that Carmack has not addressed.

    The issue that occurs to me is consistency. In order for use frequencies to be meaningful, one must count up instances within a large block of text, because verb forms vary naturally from sentence to sentence. Only over many sentences does the statistical pattern emerge. But once you get a large enough block of text, you can see the pattern; looking at larger blocks of text, beyond that size, will only confirm the same pattern more precisely.

    A half-dozen chapters of a book like 2 Nephi should be plenty long enough to see a clear grammatical pattern, if there is one to see. If the grammatical pattern shown in those six chapters is simply the native dialect of the writer, then the next six chapters by the same writer should show a very similar pattern; and the next six after those, as well; and so on. It's an essential premise of Carmack-Skousen dialectical fingerprinting, that writers don't change their natural dialects.

    According to a webpage I've just read, however, 2 Nephi shows a huge number of "did do" past tenses in chapter 5, a rather large number in the rest of chapters 1-11, a much lower number in 12-24 (which are copied from KJB Isaiah), and very few in chapters 25-33. That's not the kind of pattern you'd expect for someone writing in their native dialect, but it's very much what you'd expect if Smith was overdoing the archaic structure on purpose in the first third of the book, then noticed from the long Isaiah quote that it wasn't nearly that common in the actual KJB English, and so therefore dialed the "dids" way back in the rest of his made-up text.

    (You can check the "did" numbers in 2 Nephi yourself, or google "Stanford Carmack" as I did until you find a site on google page 2. The site in question seems respectful and reasonable to me, but it's critical, and so I won't link to it here. It's not hard to find. There may be other sites like that one; though there hasn't been much non-Mormon response to this Skousen-Carmack EModE theory, since it has only been published in in-house Mormon journals and sites.)

  8. The website Anglin refers to does not give the rate of use of non-emphatic periphrastic did, just the amount per 2 Nephi, which doesn't tell us much. Let's say a few chapters are largely in the present tense. Then they can't have a lot of did, no matter what, now can they? The writer of the page doesn't understand this. Also, the writer and Anglin don't know that there are more than 800 word/constituent differences between bulk biblical passages in the BofM and the KJV text. It is more than there would be from copying. It points to conscious altering, which is inconclusive for authorship, except there are nonbiblical eModE tweaks to it, weakening Anglin's view. And there is at least one Coverdale reading, and an alteration of a Septuagint reading as well. And occasionally there is a 1611 reading, not a 1769 reading, further weakening Anglin's view. Anyway, the did stuff wrt bulk biblical passages is inconclusive. From both the divine POV and the fraudulent POV, which Anglin argues for, there is copying with intentional alteration. So copying and tweaking KJV language yields a much lower ADP did rate. Duh.

  9. Also, neither Anglin nor the webpage's author understand that the D&C might be a revealed text as well. So the language need not be JS's there either. As a result, one cannot use the D&C and declare definitively that it's JS's language. It cannot be used as a control.

  10. Some of the language in the D&C definitely isn't Smith's. For instance, the expression "true and living church" is found in the writings of Swedenborgian's followers before the D&C was ever received as a revelation from God. And we know for sure Smith was aware of Swedenborgianism, because he made a comment about him once.

    So, if God really did 'write' the preface to the D&C, God must have admire Swedenborgianism so much to have actually borrowed one of the phrases found in their writings!

  11. That is certainly inconclusive, ebu. "True and living church" is found no later than 1660, before Swedenborg was born.

  12. I'm not entirely on board with the whole EmodE thing, so please take my following comment in that light (I find it interesting as tentative evidence that Joseph Smith is not the author of the BoM, but I don't know that it can say much more than that).

    To reiterate, the hypothesis against EmodE as evidence of divine origins is that Joseph was trying to sound archaic, and just wound up a bit off. I wonder if anyone has done a similar analysis on the book of Moses. Does it have the same apparent EmodE fingerprint as the Book of Mormon? One could also compare the Book of Abraham, though I think Moses is a better candidate, since it was produced nearer to the time of the Book of Mormon. I don't know that D&C is a good control, since even if Joseph was a fraud, he may not have been trying to sound so archaic there.

    On a separate but related note, James (and probably others) have made the claim that Emma's statement about Joseph's inability to produce a coherent document is no good, since Emma was probably either in on the con or at least highly biased to favor Joseph. When I read some of Joseph's earlier letters/first vision accounts, though, they seem to conform with Emma's statement. Certainly his later work, like the JSH version of the first vision, is much more well written. I'm curious as to people's thoughts on that.

  13. "O Lord Jesus, thou divine head of the true and living church…"

    -The Liturgy of the New Church Signifying the New Jerusalem in the Revelation, 1828.

    "Next to the Lord himself, his true and living church…"

    -The Intellectual Repository for the New Church, 1824.

    The New Church is the name for several Christian Denominations that sprung out of Swedenborgianism. Notice the dates…..

  14. ebu: Your heavy biases have clouded your judgment. Your quotes are irrelevant. They don't prove what you would like to prove.

  15. Well, they prove that you were wrong to so confidently declare that there is no mention of a "true and living church" after 1660.

    Since you tossed in that erroneous information to refute my original statement that Swedenborgian language shows up in God's revelations, you apparently took my theory very seriously at first since you went to the trouble to try to refute it.

    Now, that I have corrected you, you stick your fingers in your ears and ridicule my judgement.

    An honest, objective reader of our exchange is going to see what you have done. I am confident of that.

  16. FWIW, I find nothing distasteful about the phrase "true and living church" regardless of the source. I am also not bothered that Smith did not coin every phrase that are in the revelations. God chooses whom he will to be his mouthpiece.

    Steve

  17. I didn't say there was anything distasteful about the phrase. That wasn't my point. My point was that a revelation that is recorded in the first person as if God himself wrote it uses terminology that most likely came from Smith's own brain on account of his exposure to Swedenborgian ideas.

    If I wrote my ideas, penning them in the first person, pretending like I am God, I think you'd all consider me a rather presumptuous con.

  18. By " 'True and living church' is found no later than 1660" was meant that the first instance of this 4-word phrase is found by 1660, not ruling out that it could be found earlier. Nothing was meant in terms of later. It did not mean that it wasn't found later. Sorry for the lack of clarity. "First found" should have been used there. The confusion was unintentional.

    In any event, finding these phrases later is meaningless. If you want to argue definitively that JSJr was the author of the D&C or the BofM by certain 19c phrases then you're going to have a lot of trouble being definitive. The divine translation view allows later phrases to be used, up to 1829. Therefore, the fraudulent translation view can't prove anything substantive by these phrases. Anyway, most of the 19c phrase ebu likes to bring up have deeper roots. But because there were 10 to 100 times as many books published in the 1820s as in different decades of the 1600s means that the likelihood of finding certain syntactically banal phrases later is much higher. Hence they are essentially trivial wrt authorship claims.

    Also, the divine xlation view allows many different segments of the BofM to have slightly different characteristics from each other. It also allows the D&C to have its own linguistic signature, and that goes for other possibly revelatory texts as well.

  19. Maybe I should say again that I am not trying to prove that Joseph Smith faked the Book of Mormon. I don't know of any evidence or arguments that amount to such a proof.

    I don't feel obliged to find a perfect skeptical theory that brings every detail about the Mormon scriptures and the lives of Mormon prophets into obvious alignment with pure wickedness and deceit. If some details turn out to be hard to explain by fraud or error or whatever, I'll be happy just to shrug, at least up to a point. Weird things happen. Strange flukes occur.

    And by the same token, I'm not going to sneer and call Mormons fools if they shrug off a few awkward issues and continue believing in their faith. Skeptics like to talk about cognitive dissonance, and I think that's a real thing; but a certain amount of cognitive dissonance is inevitable, for everyone, I believe. Expecting to find a theory that fits the real world with no strain at all is one of the more naive delusions.

    When does the fit between beliefs and evidence become so strained that it really looks more like delusion or idolatry than faith? That's something everybody has to decide for themselves.

  20. The following is stupid reasoning: [ebu] "So, if God really did 'write' the preface to the D&C, God must have admire[d] Swedenborgianism so much to have actually borrowed one of the phrases found in their writings!" You need to sharpen your analytical approach, ebu. It is tiresome and lame.

  21. @Ryan:

    Perhaps there is some independent evidence that Joseph Smith was lousy with words until he got a lot of practice, later in life. But Emma Smith's assertions in themselves really carry no weight, for non-Mormons, because IF the Book of Mormon was a fraud, THEN her bias is obvious. Of course, if the Book of Mormon was not a fraud, then her reasons for exaggerating Joseph's illiteracy disappear, and her statements may be considered valuable insights into the mind of a prophet. So Emma's statements may be important for Mormons; but they still don't do anything at all towards convincing non-Mormons that Smith was too linguistically clumsy to make a Book on his own.

    I think the idea of looking at the language of other Smith writings is a good one; but it won't likely be decisive for critics, either. The hypothesis of fake archaic diction, put on deliberately but inexpertly, does not mean that Smith was addicted to making exactly the same kind of fake archaic diction all the time. Maybe once he had gained some confidence as the leader of a new religion, he could have relaxed his efforts to buff up his revelations with Bible-ish language, and reverted to a more natural dialect. But it's also plausible that he might, with increased confidence, have been emboldened to try even stronger doses of the archaism that had gone over so well in the Book of Mormon.

    The 'fake language' theory is a tough rap to beat. People can distort their language in lots of different ways, when they choose on purpose to do so. That doesn't mean that Mormons have to stop believing in the Book of Mormon, but it does mean that apologetic arguments like Carmack's, based on supposedly unique features of the Book's language, are inherently and inevitably weak. Carmack can insist otherwise as much as he wants, but fake archaism can explain an awful lot of 'unique features' pretty easily.

  22. Anon 4:50

    What if a prophet of God came to you with a new book with new prophecies from God, and these prophecies included the following: To be or not to be…" And "I came, I saw, I conquered."

    Would you take him seriously?

    There is no difference between this scenario and all the 19th Century religious expressions and phrases found in the D&C and the Book of Mormon.

  23. ebu, you don't know what you're talking about. You haven't delved into the matter. You've only engaged in superficial study and reasoning that is heavily biased and basically useless. Enjoy.

  24. Anglin: "The hypothesis of fake archaic diction, put on deliberately but inexpertly,"

    Serious problem here. Anglin doesn't know if it's fake archaic diction and doesn't know if it's inexpert, but he feels perfectly free to state an opinion despite ignorance.

    Anglin follows in a long line of critics since day one who have felt free to offer opinions without knowing the subject matter.

  25. ebu, maybe you can find the phrase "save it was" in the 19c, where "save" is a conjunction, not a verb. I'd seriously be interested to know where you found one. There are 3 or 4 of these in the BofM but it's not in the KJV.

  26. Well, yes…you beat me there. Couldn't find it. Look…I really do find this EModE stuff very intriguing. It is a great mystery story that I will continue to watch excitedly to see how it turns out. I am not being facetious. I am being sincere.

    But…I wonder when the story's plot will change, and instead of being introduced to the cast of characters (the EModE constructions that are in the BoM) we begin to see a real narrative develop.

    I hope this narrative will tell us all why in the world an ancient record in Reformed English that is now lost forever, but fortunately translated by a young farm boy/treasure digger in the early 19th Century through the power of God in a peepstone, has EModE in it!

    That is what I am waiting to hear. What purpose would this serve?

    It seems more plausible to me that Joseph Smith was channeling mischievous spirits of humans who had departed and who would have some connection with EModE.

    There is a BYU professor who interviewed A. J. Miller, the self-proclaimed Australian Jesus! Yes… a textbook cult leader who claims to be the reincarnated Jesus. The interview is on Youtube.

    Trust me…this guy is a quack, but he speaks very eloquently about Joseph Smith and the nature of spirit interactions between the spirit world and earth. And he gives a very plausible alternative. One that is actually very much in line with this EModE research.

    While I wouldn't trust this guy for a second, he is probably channeling spirits of his own. (He has convinced many that he is indeed Jesus. His girlfriend even believes she is Mary Magdalene.) I think he might indeed understand how spirits work from real-life experience being duped by them.

    You really should go and listen to the interview. It will make you sick.

  27. James,
    I agree with a lot of what you say. I don't think the EModE thing is by any means a smoking gun for divine origins. It may indicate that Joseph Smith was not the author, but as you point out, it's possible he was consciously altering his language. For me his inability to compose well-worded documents becomes important here. If he couldn't compose something decent in a dialect that was familiar to him, I have a hard time believing he could do so in an archaic dialect. Once again, I agree with you that if the whole thing was a con, Emma's statements don't carry much weight, and they do not, by themselves, prove that it was not a con. What her statement is useful for is in leading us to look at Joseph's early writings. We might ask ourselves, "was Emma right in saying that Joseph was a lousy writer?" And to test that hypothesis, we look at things he wrote. If indeed he was bad at writing, then Emma's statement becomes important for having pointed us in a useful direction. If he was not a bad writer, then we can throw Emma's statement out.

    All of that said, I am still in the same camp as many of the critics in terms of why there should be any EModE in the Book of Mormon at all. I think you've actually provided the best potential explanation I've heard so far that is neither "he was faking it" nor "he was just writing in his own dialect, whether revealed as such by God or not." I'll have to mull that one over.