Book of Mormon Questions #12 (Text and Translation)

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

What Should We Think about the King James Quotations?

 

Much of this post is taken from my recent article in BYU Studies about Royal Skousen’s Book of Mormon critical text project. Skousen devoted all of volume 3, part 5, to the quotations in the Book of Mormon from the King James Bible. Anyone who is acquainted with the Book of Mormon knows that it contains several long excerpts from the King James Bible, particularly the Sermon on the Mount and several chapters from Isaiah. But there is much more King James language in the Book of Mormon than these long quotations. In his analysis of this language, Skousen set parameters to determine what he considered a quotation. He somewhat arbitrarily determined that a passage in the Book of Mormon that was identical to the standard King James text and was sixteen words or longer could be considered a quotation. Because many of the long passages that come from the King James Bible include multiple word changes, Skousen found only thirty-six word-strings that he considered quotations.

There are more strings that are shorter than sixteen words. These Skousen classified as paraphrastic quotations. He lists eighty-three examples of paraphrastic quotations, including all strings that are between seven and fifteen words long and “a few cases of textual blending where the longest string of identical words can be as low as one or two.”¹

Skousen’s analysis of biblical language in the Book of Mormon yields some surprising findings. First, nearly every biblical quotation comes from the King James Bible, but not the original 1611 version, which one might expect given Skousen’s determination that the language of the Book of Mormon is closer to Early Modern English than to the vernacular of Joseph Smith’s day. Instead, the printing that is most likely quoted in the Book of Mormon was published between 1770 and 1820. Oddly, one particular quotation (“and upon all the ships of Tarshish,” Isa. 2:16, 2 Ne. 12:16) does not appear in the KJB at all but comes from the Masoretic Text, which is both unexpected and puzzling.

Second, “when the Book of Mormon biblical quotation differs from the King James reading, we often find that the original Book of Mormon form of the biblical quote is ungrammatical.”² This often occurs when italicized words in the KJB are either replaced or merely deleted. These words were italicized by the King James translators to indicate that there is no corresponding word in the original manuscripts, but that they were added so that sentences would make sense in English.

Third, 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.”³

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 Skousen presents in parts 3 and 4 of volume 3 (The Nature of the Original Language) 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.”⁴ This translation was then 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 and his sometimes-coeditor Stan Carmack claim that the Book of Mormon’s vocabulary, usage, and syntax derive largely from Early Modern English, but this claim raises questions that a peer reviewer mentioned to us in his blind review of an article that Carmack submitted to BYU Studies: “This approach leaves a host of questions unasked, such as why God has a particular investment in early modern English. As an early modernist, I am anything but opposed to this proposition, but the language has no obvious connection either to Book of Mormon peoples or to the 19th century American frontier.” Also, referring to the article’s tendency to simply list a variety of examples where Book of Mormon vocabulary appears in Early Modern English texts, the reviewer commented, “Seeing William Caxton (1473) appear alongside Richard Baxter (1673) as evidence of the same language strikes me as odd. English underwent massive transformation during those two centuries: reading a Caxton incunabulum and a Baxter treatise are two very different experiences, both materially and linguistically. Which English are we really talking about?”⁵

Questions, questions, and more questions. It is obvious from Skousen and Carmack’s research that the text of the Book of Mormon is not in the vernacular of Joseph Smith. It does have many features (including vocabulary) from Early Modern English. But as our reviewer pointed out, Early Modern English is a moving target. Is the Book of Mormon more similar to 1400s EME or 1600s EME or perhaps somewhere in between? From examples given by Skousen and Carmack, it appears that the Book of Mormon translation draws from all versions of EME. And even if you could pinpoint a particular period of EME, why Early Modern English at all? And how does a King James edition from 1770 to 1820 fit into this puzzle? It is obvious that whoever composed the English text of the Book of Mormon had an open copy of the KJB sitting on his desk. According to all eyewitness accounts, Joseph Smith did not. But to imagine that Joseph had memorized long sections of the Bible, especially whole chapters of Isaiah, and regurgitated them to the scribe with significant word changes (often involving italicized words) is more than a bit of a stretch.

The three points Skousen raises about the King James quotations—that most of the quotes come from an edition published between 1770 and 1820 (with the exception of that unexpected phrase from the Masoretic Text), that someone introduced grammatical errors when recording the King James quotes, and that there are troubling anachronisms revealed in the quotations—all suggest that the text of the English Book of Mormon does not really represent what was on the plates, assuming there were plates at all containing an actual history of the Nephites and Jaredites. Skousen contends that the only explanation for these issues is that someone, sometime (perhaps in the 1500s or 1600s?), in translating the original record, added text and then managed the translation over time (including updating King James content from the 1611 translation to a more recent edition) so that the language in the book would be understandable to a reader in the nineteenth century. This managed text was then revealed by miraculous means to Joseph Smith, who read it on either the interpreters or a seer stone and then dictated it to a scribe.

But if the English Book of Mormon was given to Joseph through revelation, then there was a divine hand in it. If so, how do we explain all the human sloppiness? Why not give Joseph the translation of the record as it was originally written? Who decided that the original was unacceptable? Why add material from the King James Bible instead of a translation that would correspond more closely to the most ancient Bible manuscripts? Why introduce anachronisms? Why make the English archaic instead of in Joseph’s vernacular? Why change the King James quotations, including the removal of many italicized words, sometimes making the resulting text ungrammatical? Why is King James language scattered throughout the Book of Mormon, sometimes in innocuous short phrases? If the Nephite account has been embellished with all sorts of text that wasn’t in the original account, how are we to determine what is Nephite (or Jaredite) history and what is not? Given all this, how are we to view Moroni’s famous promise? When we ask if “these things” are “true,” what does “true” even mean, and what does “these” mean? Questions such as these are why I have prayed about the Book of Mormon’s veracity in very specific terms: Is it an accurate record of a real people? But in fifty years of praying, I have never received any sort of answer, except, as I mentioned in the introduction to this series, a peaceful feeling one evening about not having to believe the Book of Mormon is a factual record. But that still doesn’t answer the primary question behind this series: What exactly is the Book of Mormon?

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1. Royal Skousen, ed., The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon, part 5, volume 3, The History of the Text of the Book of Mormon, The Critical Text of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: The Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies and Brigham Young University Studies, 2019), 10.

2. Skousen, King James Quotations, 10.

3. Skousen, King James Quotations, 6.

4. Skousen, King James Quotations, 6.

5. Peer review of article submitted to BYU Studies, in my possession.