Book of Mormon Questions #2 (translation)

 

To see the context for this and other questions in this series, please see the introduction, parts 1, 2, 3, and 4.

What kind of translation is the English Book of Mormon?

This post will begin with a couple of paragraphs I’ve pulled from my article that will appear sometime this year in BYU Studies and then wander off on its own path. The article is a summary of Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon Critical Text project. In parts 3 and 4 of volume 3, Skousen explores a good deal of the Early Modern English that appears in the Book of Mormon. There is enough for him to make the claim that “that virtually all the original language of the Book of Mormon—its words, phrases, expressions, grammatical forms, and syntactic patterns—are archaic English. In addition, I argue that the themes of the Book of Mormon are not the issues of Joseph Smith’s time and place, but instead represent the religious and cultural issues that were prevalent during the Protestant Reformation (through the 1500s and 1600s).”¹ In a later post, I’ll spend more time with this notion, but for today I want to discuss a claim Skousen makes in part 5 of volume 3, where he examines King James quotations and paraphrases that appear in the Book of Mormon.

Skousen states that there are three anachronistic problems involving biblical quotations: (1) Words appear in the Book of Mormon biblical quotations that the King James translators got wrong; there are also cultural translations that are historically incorrect. (2) The Book of Mormon includes text from the Textus Receptus (the text King James translators relied on) that does not appear in the earliest biblical manuscripts. (3) The Book of Mormon identifies text as being from Isaiah that biblical scholars associate with a “Second Isaiah,” who lived after the fall of Jerusalem, long after Lehi and his family departed. Skousen points out that there are ways to deal with the Second Isaiah problem, but “it isn’t necessary to do so.”²

These anachronisms, Skousen concludes, are problematic “only if we assume that the Book of Mormon translation literally represents what was on the plates.” But the evidence presented in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 suggests that the Book of Mormon text is based on Early Modern English and that the themes in the book are more connected to the Protestant Reformation than to either Joseph Smith’s time or ancient America. “What this means is that the Book of Mormon is a creative and cultural translation of what was on the plates, not a literal one. Based on the linguistic evidence, the translation must have involved serious intervention from the English-language translator, who was not Joseph Smith.”³ Now, that’s quite a statement. This “creative and cultural translation” was then apparently transmitted to Joseph Smith word for word, which he read to the scribes, who sometimes imperfectly recorded Joseph’s words in the original manuscript. Skousen’s work leaves no question about this latter point, but I’d like to address the notion of a creative and cultural translation.

What Skousen appears to mean by this is that the “translation” isn’t a pure translation, such as the one I created when I labored carefully over Theodor Storm’s novella Immensee and rendered it into English as accurately as I could, trying to preserve not just the meaning of the sentences but also the syntax and the nineteenth-century “feel” of the story wherever possible. No, that’s not what “translation” means regarding the Book of Mormon. Apparently, a lot of stuff was added to whatever was recorded on the plates, some of it anachronistic, some of it internally inconsistent. This raises numerous troubling questions. I’ll mention just a few here.

First, if the translation that Joseph received somehow through either the “interpreters” (what we now call the Urim and Thummim) or his seer stone was not all that close to what was on the plates, what purpose did the plates serve? Even without Skousen’s claim of a creative and cultural translation, we could ask this question, since Joseph didn’t even look at the plates while “translating.” Why have plates at all, except as visual evidence (that only a few were permitted to see) that something extraordinary was going on?

Second, if Joseph didn’t translate the Book of Mormon, even in a creative or cultural way, as Skousen insists, then who did? I gave a somewhat tongue-in-cheek answer to that question in both a book review for Journal of Book of Mormon Studies and an article for Dialogue, but Skousen dismisses my (and anyone else’s) speculation as just that. Still, it’s a question worth asking. (If you’re wondering about my speculation, here’s a clue: Who spoke English and also understood the ancient Nephite language and also liked to quote scripture out of the King James Bible, but with subtle changes to the KJV text?)

Third, if there’s a lot of extraneous material added to the Book of Mormon record, how do we figure out what has been added and what is original? Many of my questions in this series will likely be attempting to answer this question, or perhaps to dismiss it.

Fourth, who’s to say, then, that any of the English Book of Mormon is actually an accurate record of an ancient people? And if it’s somehow all mixed up with Early Modern language, theology, and issues, why? Why is God so interested in that time period?

Skousen is very open about how his scholarship and his testimony of the book are separate though related, but I don’t have that luxury since, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series of questions, I have never received any sort of spiritual confirmation about the Book of Mormon. Here’s what Skousen said, for instance, in an interview with Daniel Peterson:

“My testimony of the Book of Mormon is not based on my work on the critical text, but rather on my own personal witness from 40 years ago that this book records events which really happened (even though its English translation, given by the Lord to Joseph Smith, is a cultural and creative one).”⁴ And here’s a more complete account given in a Skousen essay published by FAIR in 2009: “My own personal witness of this book dates from 1979, when I was reading the book during a time of difficulty. I was reading the words that king Lamoni’s queen expresses as she comes out of her state of unconsciousness (Alma 19:29–30). . . . As I was reading this passage, the Spirit witnessed to me, ‘This really happened.’”⁵ 

I have recently posted about how difficult deciphering spiritual feelings can be. I don’t mean to criticize anyone who has had a spiritual witness of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon, but Skousen’s testimony leaves me somewhat puzzled. He, better than any living human, knows the difficulties the Book of Mormon text presents. And they are significant. Since I don’t have the luxury of falling back on a spiritual confirmation of the book, and God doesn’t seem inclined to give me one, I am left to ask questions about the text, the story and doctrines it presents, and the historical accounts surrounding its reception and “translation” and to try to arrive at some sort of conclusion.

So, what kind of translation is the English Book of Mormon? Good question. Stay tuned.

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1. Royal Skousen, ed., The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, vol. 3, part 3, The Nature of the Original Language, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham University Studies, 2018), 3.

2. Skousen, King James Quotations, 5:6.

3. Skousen, King James Quotations, 5:6.

4. Daniel C. Peterson and Royal Skousen, “A Critical Text: An Interview with Royal Skousen,” interview conducted via email September 10, 2019, published January 11, 2020, The Interpreter Foundation, https://interpreterfoundation.org/a-critical-text/.

5. Royal Skousen, “My Testimony of the Book of Mormon, Scholarly and Personal,” FAIR (Faithful Answers, Informed Response, formerly FairMormon and originally Foundation for Apologetic Information and Research), December 2009, https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/testimonies/scholars/royal-skousen.