The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project

One of the interesting aspects of my job is that I am the primary proofreader for Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text Project. If you haven’t heard of the Critical Text Project, you really need to look into it. A good place to start would be here. Royal is a linguistics professor at BYU and has been working on the Critical Text for about thirty years. It is, and I am not exaggerating, the most important research on the Book of Mormon that has ever been conducted. It is amazing.

Royal is methodically coming to the end of the project, but so far it has produced fourteen rather large books, with three or four still to come, two of which I’ve been proofreading in the past several months. Volume 1 is a typographical facsimile of the extant portion of the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon (about 28 percent survived water damage from 40 years in a leaky cornerstone in the Nauvoo House). Volume 2 is a typographical facsimile of the printer’s manuscript (in two parts). Volume 4 (which, for some reason, preceded volume 3) is titled Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (in six parts). These books “analyze 5,280 cases of variations (or potential variation) in the text.” What Royal means by “the text” includes the original manuscript, the printed manuscript, and some 20 printed editions of the Book of Mormon by both the LDS and RLDS churches. Because Royal found more variants as he was publishing the six books, he decided to publish a second, more complete edition a few years ago.

In 2009, when he finished volume 4, Royal then published with Yale University Press a version of the Book of Mormon that is, as far as he can determine, the text that Joseph Smith actually dictated. There are 354 conjectured readings in The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text, which means that these are Royal’s best estimates, based on the textual evidence, of the words that Joseph Smith dictated but that somehow ended up different in the manuscripts or 1830 printing. And Royal has also restored the original text where it has been edited or otherwise altered over the years.

Since 2009, Royal has been working on volume 3, titled The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon (in maybe seven parts). The first four parts have been published, two titled Grammatical Variation and two titled The Nature of the Original Language. Grammatical Variation, as you might surmise, examines in detail the grammar of the Book of Mormon. I am one of a handful of people who have read all 1,281 pages of Grammatical Variation. Believe me, it’s not a page turner. It is a detailed examination of the sometimes strange grammar of the Book of Mormon, which turns out to be quite fascinating, if you like that sort of thing. But it is absolutely crucial for understanding what the Book of Mormon is. The Nature of the Original Language looks, primarily, at fascinating and sometimes perplexing parallels between the Book of Mormon text and Early Modern English constructions, some of which were camouflaged when Joseph edited the text in 1837 (and again, to a lesser degree, in 1840).

Part 5 of volume 3 explores the appearance of King James Bible text in the Book of Mormon, and we’re not talking here about just the large swaths of Isaiah or Matthew that are copied almost verbatim into the Book of Mormon. King James text (both Old and New Testament) appears all throughout the book, and it is often skillfully woven into the text in intricate and surprising ways. This fact leads to some conclusions about the Book of Mormon text that create some interesting dilemmas for scriptural purists.

Part 6, which I’m proofreading right now, is a careful examination of the spelling in the original and printer’s manuscripts. Two big takeaways here. First, Joseph’s scribes couldn’t spell worth a lick. Even Oliver Cowdery, who was passing himself off as a school teacher, was a horrible speller, although not as bad as Hyrum Smith. But he did sometimes learn how to spell words through the scribing and proofing process. To give you some idea of how bad the spelling was (and English spelling was indeed standardized by 1829), this book has over 400 pages of spelling blunders, some of them pretty awful. The second takeaway is that my appreciation for John Gilbert has skyrocketed. John Gilbert was the compositor (typesetter) who worked for E. B. Grandin. When you realize that he received a completely unpunctuated text with misspellings everywhere, it is frankly amazing that he was able to make sense of the manuscript. He made a few errors, but we can understand the Book of Mormon today largely because of the work of Gilbert.

The Critical Text Project started with FARMS in about 1988. FARMS, of course, became the Maxwell Institute, but Royal and the Maxwell Institute had a falling out after the publication of volume 4 and the Yale edition, so BYU Studies picked up the project. We published the first four parts of volume 3 and will publish the remainder. We also published the second edition of volume 4. When Royal is finally finished with this monumental work, he is planning to issue volume 5, A Complete Electronic Collation of the Book of Mormon. In his words, “This electronic, searchable collation is a lined-up comparison of the important textual sources and specifies every textual variant in the history of the Book of Mormon text.” It is, in other words, the raw data that Royal has used to conduct his research on the Book of Mormon. And he is going to make it available to other researchers so that they can continue the work he has started.

Let me say a word, in general, about the Critical Text. It is a staggering work of research. And I believe that nobody other than Royal Skousen could have pulled this off. It is so detailed, so thorough, and so professional that it will still be relevant in 50 years, maybe far longer. Already any serious Book of Mormon scholar has to use Royal’s Yale edition of the book if he or she wants to get the textual scholarship right. Using the latest LDS publication simply won’t suffice. For me, it has been both fun and informative to get a full preview of Royal’s most recent work. For most researchers, these are reference works. But I get to read them cover to cover. It’s not easy reading, but it is extremely educational. Royal has told me he needs my “jaundiced eye” to give the typeset pages one last look before they go to print. I take that as a compliment. I let most of his unique style quirks slide, but I do question him now and then on an assumption or a conclusion. And I find an occasional typo or misplaced word. Royal is stubborn about some things, but reasonable and generous about others. If one of his students or another researcher finds something that he uses in the Critical Text, he always gives credit. He is also not generating a defensive product. This is a work of careful scholarship. If he finds something that either goes against convention or is hard to explain, he simply presents it. Most important to him is to get the data out there so that we can all look at it and draw our own conclusions.

I’m looking forward to seeing the project finished. I’m sure Royal is too. He will retire when the final volume is published. And at that point, he will have completed one of the most impressive and useful research projects in LDS history.