Part 4 - Alternate Origin Theories

In my previous post, I presented the official origin story of the Book of Mormon, while also pointing out a few issues with it.  My opinion of the Book of Mormon, that it is not a translation of an ancient record, does not rest so much on its origin story as on its contents and the lack of corroborating evidence.  Nevertheless, if the peoples described in the Book of Mormon never existed, we still have to account for the existence of the Book of Mormon itself.  How did the text of the Book of Mormon come to be written?  The main possibilities are that Joseph Smith wrote it, someone else wrote it, or multiple people wrote it.

One theory appearing as early as 1831 is that Sydney Rigdon wrote the Book of Mormon using an unpublished portion of a manuscript written by Solomon Spalding.  Official Mormon history has Rigdon first meeting Joseph Smith December 1830, eight months after the publication of the Book of Mormon.  The first proponents of the Spalding-Rigdon theory claimed that Joseph Smith knew Sidney Rigdon much earlier and that their later meeting was concocted after the fact.  A 2008 Stanford-based study using computer-aided statistical analysis of word usage determined that probable Book of Mormon authors were Rigdon, Spalding, and Oliver Cowdery.  However, the results of this study are controversial because Smith was not included as a possible author due to a lack of pure writing samples where Smith did not use a scribe.  An abstract of the Stanford-based study can be found here.  The Maxwell Institute discusses the Spalding-Rigdon theory in this article.

I have included in this post and a previous post links to articles from the Maxwell Institute.  The Maxwell Institute is a department of the church-owned Brigham Young University devoted to religious scholarship from a pro-Mormon perspective.  I have primarily included these links to present the Mormon view on specific issues.  However, these articles are very long and complex and seem to be more aimed at obfuscation than clarity.  Perhaps the authors feel that the issues themselves are complex enough to merit such lengthy treatment, but I believe that the central issues could be discussed more concisely.  The strategy seems to be to bury the reader in so much detail of questionable relevance that the truly relevant issues are obscured.  For the faithful, it is enough to know that responses to critics exist.  Whether they truly answer the issues is something that most believers probably do not know because few of them actually slog their way through these lengthy tomes.  In a future post, I will go into more detail about the actual content of some of the existing Book of Mormon apologetics and explain why I do not find it convincing.

Statistical analysis of word usage similar to the Standford study frequently appears in Mormon apologetic writings.  The aim is to prove that the Book of Mormon was written by multiple authors as claimed in the text itself rather than by Joseph Smith.  The assumption is that the multiple authors were Nephi, Jacob, Mormon, and Moroni rather than any 19th-century authors.  Having no other writings of these hypothetical ancient American authors the best that can be deduced from these analyses would be multiple authorship in general, not who the specific authors happened to be.  This article from the Maxwell Institute describes one such analysis.

These analyses are sometimes called wordprints.  A Google search on "wordprint analysis authorship" returns nothing but pages referring to the Book of Mormon.  I am doubtful about how reliable this technique is since it does not seem to have gained general acceptance among professional linguists outside of Mormon circles.  I discussed wordprint analysis with a linguistics professor while I was attending Colorado State University and she urged caution on taking the conclusions of these studies too seriously.  She pointed out to me quite a few factors that complicate things.  Usage of a single author can change over time and in different settings, styles, and genres.  Furthermore, it is unclear whether a translation would reflect the usage of the original author or the translator.  Good translations are not word for word but the idioms of the source language must be interpreted and put into the idioms of the target language for the original meanings to be best represented.

My main issue with the multiple-authorship theory is that such a conspiracy of deception would have been difficult to maintain.  It is much simpler to attribute the creation of the Book of Mormon to Joseph Smith himself.  Objections to this on the grounds that he was not capable are not convincing to me.  Biologist Richard Dawkins calls this logical fallacy the argument from incredulity.  Since believers cannot personally conceive of how Joseph Smith could have possibly written the Book of Mormon, it must be a genuine translation of an ancient golden record given to him by an angel.  How does anyone know what Joseph Smith was capable of doing?  If he did it, he was obviously capable of it.  I personally do not understand how Einstein conceived of General Relativity or how Handel composed the entire Messiah in 24 days, but they clearly did those things.  The argument from incredulity says more about our limitations than the capabilities of geniuses.

In an upcoming post, I will argue that Joseph Smith was fully capable of producing the Book of Mormon and that this is the most plausible explanation of its origins.  However, even if he had help, that still does not change my main thesis that the Book of Mormon is a 19th century creation, not a translation of an ancient record.  That is the main point I am arguing with all the posts in this series.