Evidence for Critical Theories

As a potential critic, I struggled with the skeptic’s Book of Mormon source theories because they lacked evidence. No matter my complaints about God or the Church, I could not reconcile the Book of Mormon. It frustrated me because I could not explain it. At best, some critic’s theories have limited parallels or random coincidences. Whereas we have the Book of Mormon. It actually exists. There is a place, a time in history, and a writer/translator. Critics have yet to show sufficient evidence beyond loose parallels that Joseph Smith fabricated the Book of Mormon.

The uncomfortable truth for critics is that no negative evidence supports their theories of how Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon.

Where is the evidence that Joseph Smith forged metal plates? Did he have experience and knowledge of metalworking? Did he have the resources? Where are the eyewitnesses who saw Joseph Smith etch characters onto metal plates?

Where is the evidence that he had or even knew of any of the books listed by critics as potential sources? Where are the witness statements that Joseph had sources with him during the translation?

What evidence is there that Joseph Smith had access to ancient maps of Arabia?

Where is the evidence that Joseph Smith was familiar with Hebraisms? Or had an intimate knowledge of ancient Egyptian and Hebrew names?

Where is the evidence that Joseph Smith had help from other writers? Where are the co-conspirators admitting that it was all a hoax?

How about any of the witnesses ever admitting that they lied? Did Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, and the rest ever confess that the angel and plates they saw were pretended?

One-off explanations (lacking evidence) of how Joseph Smith could have done one thing or another got repetitive and old to me. For example, here is a Reddit thread where a critic tries to undermine the incredible feat of the Book of Mormon.² I see these sorts of arguments all the time.

“Here are a few people who had very little formal education, but went on to do incredible things:

Mark Twain (famous writer)---Dropped out of school at 12 years old! He still managed to write 28 books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer!

William Shakespeare (famous writer)---dropped out of school at 13 years old. He wrote at least 39 plays.

Abraham Lincoln (President of USA)---1 Year of formal education.

Henry Ford (inventor and engineer)---8th grade education.

If Mark Twain and William Shakespeare could self-educate by reading books, so could Joseph Smith.”

The issue is that these points only strengthen the Book of Mormon’s claim of divine authenticity.

“Mark Twain (famous writer)---Dropped out of school at 12 years old! He still managed to write 28 books, including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer!”

Didn’t Mark Twain write his first book, The Innocents Abroad, at age 41? After working as a newspaper editor for eight years?³ Isn’t that book less than half the size of the Book of Mormon?

“William Shakespeare (famous writer)---dropped out of school at 13 years old. He wrote at least 39 plays.”

Aren’t plays significantly shorter in word count than the Book of Mormon? Aren’t Shakespeare’s plays an average of 22,595 words,⁴ whereas the Book of Mormon is 269,000? Did Shakespeare write plays in one draft?

“Abraham Lincoln (President of USA)---1 Year of formal education.”

Abraham Lincoln was an incredible example of self-education. Is there any evidence that Joseph Smith was a prolific reader like Abraham Lincoln?

“Henry Ford (inventor and engineer)---8th grade education.”

Interesting? What does this have to do with Joseph Smith?

“If Mark Twain and William Shakespeare could self-educate by reading books, so could Joseph Smith.”

Did any of these brilliant people write a 269,000-word book in one draft in 65 days? Is there any evidence that Joseph Smith read or even had access to a library of books he would have needed before 1829?

Here is another example from critic “Zelph on the Shelf” on X (Twitter)⁵:

“William Faulkner wrote ‘As I Lay Dying’ in 6 weeks without a single alteration to the draft. Both ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘On the Road’ were written in 3 weeks. ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ was written in 3 days.”

Same story as before, don’t these authorship points only strengthen the case for the Book of Mormon?

“William Faulkner wrote ‘As I Lay Dying’ in 6 weeks without a single alteration to the draft.”

Isn’t As I Lay Dying 56,000 words?⁶ Wasn’t it William Faulkner’s 3^rd published book?⁷ Wasn’t he college-educated and had plenty of experience in writing before this book?

“Both ‘Clockwork Orange’ and ‘On the Road’ were written in 3 weeks.”

Weren’t Jack Kerouac⁸ (author of On the Road) and Anthony Burgess⁹ (author of Clockwork Orange) already prolific writers before these works? Wasn’t On the Road the final version of a book Jack Kerouac had been trying to write for years?¹⁰ Didn’t Jack’s publisher reject the first manuscript and request Jack to revise it? Isn’t Clockwork Orange 53,000 words?¹¹ Weren’t both Jack Kerouac and Anthony Burgess University educated?

‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ was written in 3 days.”

Isn’t Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 28,668 words? Wasn’t the first draft of the book written in 3 days, discarded, and re-written in the version we know today in 3 weeks?¹² Wasn’t the author, Robert Stevenson, university-educated?

Did any of these authors have limited formal education and write a 269,000-word book in one draft in 65 days as their first published work?

Brian Hales offers an excellent comparison of authors to Joseph Smith. He compares the author's age, education, book word count, book complexity, and composition timeline. In nearly every category, Joseph Smith is the outlier. When combining all the factors, no one else is like him.¹³

The truth is that there is plenty of evidence for the divine claims of the Book of Mormon. I grew leery of critics minimizing positive evidence for the Book of Mormon while maximizing unsubstantiated negative theories. The evidence for the Book of Mormon is persuasive; however, it is also not irrefutable. Yet, isn’t the archeological evidence interesting? Doesn’t the Hebraisms and other linguistic evidence make a case for the Book of Mormon? Aren’t the testimonies of the witnesses to the Book of Mormon thought-provoking? Don’t the eliminated anachronisms bolster the claims of the Book of Mormon? How believable is it that a 23-year-old farm boy created a book with 600 geographical references that are spatially consistent? A book with 200 name characters, several plot lines, three migrations, and a currency system? Isn’t the Book of Mormon quite complex? Do critics want me to ignore the mountain of evidence and focus on the molehill of their contradictory parallels?

So, the question that started this letter remains.

Where did the Book of Mormon come from?

After years of interacting with critics’ ideas about the Book of Mormon's creation, I saw more and more holes. Critics suggest several theories, but those theories contradict one another. Any one theory sounds reasonable by itself. But as soon as I attempt to create a plausible narrative, it all falls apart. Critics do not seem to understand that contradictory theories are mutually debilitating instead of reinforcing. I started to see that many critics start with naturalistic assumptions (“angels don’t give plates to men”) and attempt to reverse-engineer how Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon.

Critics have no evidence of the Book of Mormon's creation; they only have theories. Below is my attempt to summarize the collection of critical, naturalistic theories about the creation of the Book of Mormon.

Joseph Smith was a creative genius. He had, after all, a homeschool education and maybe 2-3 years of formal education. With this type of education, he would have learned basic arithmetic, writing, and reading skills. A poor farm boy with little formal education to dictate a 269,000-word religious text in one draft would have to be a creative genius. He got the idea of the Book of Mormon in 1828 from his friend Sidney Rigdon. Never mind that he didn't meet Rigdon until after the Book of Mormon publication in 1830. Even though Joseph Smith had never met Sidney Rigdon, Sidney got a copy of an unfinished and unpublished book, the Spaulding Manuscript, and gave it to Joseph. From it, Joseph liked the part about a group of Romans who were blown off course and landed in America. Then, in 1829, Joseph asked his Mom's 3rd cousin, Oliver Cowdery, to contribute more elements to the Book of Mormon. Oliver chose elements from the View of the Hebrews that he had a copy of and would have read several times. They borrowed unique elements from the View of the Hebrews, like the destruction of Jerusalem, the scattering of Israel, traveling on the ocean, encountering the valley of a great river, a man standing on a wall warning people, pride denounced, idolatry and human sacrifice, and long wars breaking out between groups of people. They borrowed these high-level, superficial elements from the View of the Hebrews so as not to give themselves away for 75 years. Then Joseph Smith and Oliver Cowdery cracked open their copy of the First Book of Napolean. The duo spent days finding words and phrases from 25 different pages to construct the same words and phrases on several pages of the Book of Mormon. After they finished assembling scattered phrases from the First Book of Napolean; they dusted off their old textbook, the Late War Between the United States and Great Britain. Phrases like “stripling,” “curious workmanship,” and “rod of iron” in the book struck Joseph Smith. He used the phrases in completely different contexts in the Book of Mormon because he liked them so much. Then Joseph Smith wove in scriptures from the Bible and zingers from his local pastors. Hebraisms naturally came to him as a creative genius. He inserted several Hebraic chiasmus poetic structures, though that style was not used in his day. He included a beautiful and complex 30-verse chiasmus in Alma 36, with Jesus Christ at the center of the poem. Ancient literary forms came naturally to him as a creative genius. He had access to ancient maps no one else had access to with the words Nahom or Nihm in Arabia. With those same maps, he understood the geography of the Red Sea and Arabia at the time of Lehi’s journey in 600 BC. He correctly guessed the existence of a bountiful land in modern-day Oman with trees, fruit, honey, ore, cliffs, and sea shores. Joseph was familiar with the circumstances of ancient Israel around 600 BC, long before scholars were. He had enough experience in olive tree cultivation in upstate New York (although no such cultivation is known of) to write the allegory of Jacob 5. He had a complex map of the promised land in his mind to give the Book of Mormon consistent geography. The Book of Mormon contains 345 names, including 86 place names. Some of these names he took from the Bible. For others, he used names of places around upstate New York that didn’t exist yet. The rest he made up. He borrowed Moroni and “Comoro” from a favorite pirate book about Captain Kidd. The parallels between Hebrew and Egyptian, on the one hand, and the unique names in the Book of Mormon, on the other hand, are coincidental. He defied the consensus beliefs of his day about the ancient American people, which later turned out to be true because he had good instincts. His book outlined a civilized society with great cities, temples, large armies, etc. Luckily, most of his guesses have panned out or are trending that way. Fortunately, archeologists eliminated anachronisms like concrete and barley in the Americas and metal plates. Joseph forgot that Alma is a woman’s name in Latin when he named a male prophet Alma in the Book of Mormon. Luckily for him, researchers later discovered that Alma was an ancient Hebrew male name. In the Book of Mormon, Joseph could dictate different literary styles. He created at least eight distinctive voices and styles for Nephi, Jacob, Alma, Abinadi, Nephi (son of Helaman), Mormon, Moroni, and Jesus Christ. All of these styles were different from his own. Joseph had to fill in the gaps because the source material available to him contributed so little to the Book of Mormon. He filled the rest of the Book of Mormon with beautiful sermons, allegories, parables, doctrines, and principles. Teachings with the complexity and simplicity necessary to touch millions of people for almost 200 years. The doctrines outlined in the Book of Mormon resolve some of the most complex theological issues in Christianity. He was familiar with the literature on those issues. As a creative genius, he was good at solving spiritual problems on the fly. Mostly homeschooled, Joseph Smith received the education required to dictate the Book of Mormon. He pulled this off by studying the Bible, receiving tutoring from his brother Hyrum between long hours working on the family farm, participating in local religious activities, family storytelling gatherings, a brief stint as an exhorter at Methodist meetings, and possible involvement in a local juvenile debate club. Joseph Smith had the requisite ancient maps. He had mounds of books, mostly memorized or available during translation. He had time to read up on all that material when he was seven years old and bedridden after his leg surgery in 1813. He hid this source material, perhaps inside his hat. He either hid all this source material from his scribes and other interested parties, or they were part of the scheme, too. Because of the excitement about the gold plates, Joseph Smith had to finish the translation quickly. He managed to dictate/write the book on a short deadline because he worked great under pressure. The Book of Mormon prophesies that there would be three witnesses. Fortuitously, Joseph found three men willing to lie to fulfill the prophecy. Oliver Cowdery, Martin Harris, and David Whitmer were so involved in the scheme that they never admitted it. Even after their estrangement from the church. The witnesses maintained the narrative even when they, later in life, had every incentive to call out any falsehood in the coming forth of the Book of Mormon. Other witnesses also maintained the narrative of the plates for the rest of their lives despite their knowledge of its forgery. Joseph Smith was unfamiliar with Book of Mormon passages because he was so creative. He was so brilliant that he could not recall what he had made. He received comfort from its pages for the rest of his life because it was that good. The Book of Mormon is multi-valency. That is, of course, because Joseph Smith was a creative genius.

Isn’t “creative genius” code for “I have no idea”?

Critics, is it not fair to say that the Book of Mormon is an anomaly at the very least?

The circular visual below is the best critical natural explanation I’ve ever heard for how Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon.

How much education/experience did Joseph Smith have?

Enough to write the Book of Mormon

Whatever education/experience Joseph Smith had

How much education/experience was required to write the Book of Mormon?

Once I accepted that an angel gave Joseph Smith metal plates and that he translated those plates by the gift and power of God, everything started to make sense to me. When I believed that Joseph Smith was a fraud (pious or not), I could not reconcile that belief with the evidence. Those theories only left me more confused. If critics accept the possibility of the divine, everything else in the evidence will start to make sense to them.

For the sincere skeptic, the Book of Mormon should be a wonder. It seems to emerge from nowhere.

When reviewing the totality of evidence, I’ve concluded that the Book of Mormon should not exist naturally for two primary reasons:

1). Joseph Smith’s education and experience

The hypothetical plausible scenario - A gifted writer/orator with decades of experience could maybe write something like the Book of Mormon. Perhaps a scholar with extensive education in writing, dictation, and religion could do it. At a minimum, they would need sufficient education and experience in ancient Egyptian and Hebrew languages, Israelite traditions, Arabian geography, Mesoamerican culture, battle tactics, and olive tree cultivation. They need to be clever enough to create distinct voices in their religious text even though other famous authors during the same period could not do that. They would also need mounds of source material, including ancient maps beyond their ability to access. They would need to reference these various sources often. The hypothetical historical religious book would take years, countless drafts, and multiple editors.

The reality - Joseph Smith was 23 years old when he translated the Book of Mormon in one draft in about 65 days.

Despite the critics' attempts to explain how he did it, their models do not fit the facts. In addition to being young and inexperienced, Joseph was not “inclined toward books”¹⁸ and did not have much experience in writing.¹⁹ We have no documented public sermons he gave before 1829,²⁰ and contemporary critics in his day labeled Joseph as an ignoramus.

2). Widely believed information and limited available resources in 1829

The Book of Mormon defies beliefs held in Joseph Smith’s day. Details about Native Americans, Arabia, ancient Israel, metal plates, Mesoamerica, ancient languages, and Christian doctrine differ from what was conventional in 1829. The Church’s critics have ridiculed the Book of Mormon for almost 200 years. Even though the evidence keeps piling up in favor of the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s claims. When a critic mocks some aspect of the Book of Mormon, it only bolsters its divine origin because time proves critical theories wrong. Critics seem content holding on to an increasingly smaller list of unanswered questions as time passes.

The resources that support the Book of Mormon, which were not available to Joseph Smith, are staggering. Since 1966, most critical claims against the Book of Mormon have been debunked. Joseph Smith was either a prophet of God or the world’s greatest guesser.

Critics, what stronger evidence could you have? What does evidence look like? What is good enough evidence?