SRP Paper#15: Intro. to Book of Mormon Source Criticism

THE SPALDING

RESEARCH PROJECT

Dale R. Broadhurst's "Spalding Papers"

"Index" -- 01 02 03 04 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 -- "Home"

The Book and the Manuscript

An Introduction to Book of Mormon Source Criticism

by Dale R. Broadhurst

Independent Media Project Class Presentation Report
ED-376 (Media and Message in Christian Education)

February 27, 1980
(revised April 2, 1980)

Methodist Theological School in Ohio

Return to: SRP Paper 15: Introduction

The Book and the Manuscript

A Slide Presentation

Given by:

Dale R. Broadhurst

University Baptist Church

Columbus, Ohio

April 2, 1980

Page 02

This is a story about a book -- a very strange and wonderous book whose message has touched the lives of millions of people.

And it's a story about an old manuscript -- an unfinished novel that few people have ever even heard of.

But it's also a story about people -- people who were looking for a better way of life in service to their God.

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Note: All comments here are condensed from the original presentation. Click on the page number link to read the full text. Click on the index images to see their enlargements.

Page 03

Young Joseph Smith junior of Sharon Vermont was one of these people.

Joseph was ten years old when his pioneer family moved west to Manchester, New York.

This area was the scene of ongoing religious ferment and change -- an atmosphere quite different from Puritan Vermont.

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Note: This was originally a private presentation. Copyrighted index graphics are not linked to enlargements. They will be replaced by non-copyrighted images in rev. 2 of this document.

Page 04

Joseph became involved in the religious searching common at the time -- and in the Spring of 1820 is said to have experienced a vision of heavenly personages.

The account was told in different ways in later years and it's hard now to know exactly what happened to the young man.

Whatever it was, his life was redirected towards better goals and pursuits than he had previously known.

Page 05

During the next seven years Joseph continued to have wonderous experiences that he related as heavenly visitations. He excitedly told his family details about the ancient inhabitants of the Americas and about a strange historical record he would one day receive.

In the Fall of 1827 Joseph reported that at last he had been entrusted with this special ancient record -- as a temporary gift from an angelic messenger.

Page 06

This gift was an ancient record of a long forgotten people who had once inhabited the Americas.

But the record first had to be "translated" -- so that a proper English version could be given to the people of Joseph's day. The young man and his associates set about this difficult and lengthy rask. Finally, in 1830, they published this "translation" as a book.

Page 07

Joseph's translation of the record was printed under an odd title: "The Book of Mormon."

The book claimed to be an account written mostly by Mormon, upon thick sheets having the appearance of gold. But a large part of Mormon's story was taken from the earlier "plates of Nephi." Nephi was a hitherto unknown prophet among the prehistoric peoples of the Americas.

Page 08

The record of Mormon, with additions by his son, Moroni, was said to have been buried in what is now New York state in about 421 CE.

The person who buried the record, Moroni the son of Mormon, claimed to be last survivor of the fair-skinned, civilized people who had kept sacred records from the time of Nephi forward. These people were exterminated in the tremendous battles of Moroni's day.

Page 09

A number of Joseph's neighbors claimed to have seen the Nephite record. Either directly or in visions, they saw what looked like page-sized plates of gold.

Joseph's report was that there were several sets of plates, including those he used in his book: the "small plates of Nephi" and the larger "plates of Mormon" and his son, Moroni.

Page 10

Here we see a diagram of the two sets of plates, with the small plates of Nephi stacked atop the others.

The names of the book divisions of the Book of Mormon have been added for reference.

There are 15 divisions, beginning with First Nephi and continuing down to the Book of Moroni.

Page 11

The story begins in the book of First Nephi. A small group of Israelites leave Jerusalem just before the fall of Judah in 587 BCE.

With divine assistance, the patriarch Lehi, his son Nephi, and the others sail for an unknown land.

After a perilous voyage through a terrible storm they arrive at last, in safety, in the ancient Americas.

Page 12

These escaped Israelites multiply and produce a great civilization. In the process they become split into two distinct peoples -- the lighter-skinned Nephites and the darker, less civilized Lamanites.

While the Nephites mostly keep their ancestral religion and lifestyle, the hostile Lamanites forsake their heritage and adopt a more primitive way of life.

Following the Book of Mormon story, the Lamanites appear to be the ancestors of at least some of the American Indian tribes.

Page 13

In 1831 the people who accepted the Book of Mormon as true followed Joseph, their latter day prophet from New York to the region around Kirtland, Ohio.

The "Mormonites" were not well received by all their Ohio neighbors. Within a couple of years Eber D. Howe, a local newspaper editor, published a book attacking these people, their prophet, and their "gold bible."

Howe charged that a former preacher named Solomon Spalding, who had once lived in nearby Conneaut, was the real author of the Book of Mormon -- that it was a fictional history, reworked into fake scripture.

Page 14

Solomon Spalding never published his fictional story about the ancient Americans, but some of his neighbors around Conneaut had read the account or had heard it read.

No one knows for sure how many such stories Spalding wrote, but one of them still survives in manuscript form and is kept in the archives of Oberlin College in northern Ohio.

This "Oberlin Spalding manuscript" was mentioned by Howe in his book and by some of Spalding's old associates. These people did not claim that this particular story was the same as the Book of Mormon.

Page 15

The Oberlin MS tells the story of a small number of people leave Rome in the time of Constantine. With divine assistance, they and their leader, Fabius, sail to a far off land.

After a perilous voyage through a terrible storm they arrive at last, in safety, in the ancient Americas.

Here they meet a civilized, light-skinned people. Like the Book of Mormon's Nephites, the Sciotans and rival Kentucks are later exterminated in great battles and forgotten. Only their "mound-builder" earthworks and relics remained in Spalding's day.

Page 16

The Oberlin MS and the Book of Mormon share many textual similarities but do not tell the same story. Spalding's work has very little of the Jewish and Christian religious material which so characterizes the Mormon book.

Howe claimed there were two reasons for this difference. 1. Spalding had re-written his first story in the biblical style. 2. To this alleged second story Joseph's second-in-command, Sidney Rigdon, had added religious material reflecting his own beliefs, thus creating the Book of Mormon. However, Howe could not offer solid proof for any of this.

Page 17

Though the Oberlin MS resembles the Book of Mormon only in part, it is still possible to chart a comparison of their common themes, vocabulary, and phrases.

When these textual similarities are charted on a diagram of the Mormon "plates," we find that they appear as distinct clusters in that book.

These clusters are marked in red on the plates diagram. The longest continuous cluster is found in the last part of the Book of Alma. Here the resemblances to Spalding's work are particularly distinct, dense, and detailed.

Page 18

The part of the book of Alma which bears this high resemblance to Spalding's text is the story of the Nephite-Lamanite wars, in which the Nephites go to battle under their great general, Moroni the first.

These battle stories are similar in a number of ways to the Spalding battle stories in the Oberlin MS. The two sets of stories contain many examples of parallel themes and language -- language that also frequently resembles the battle stories of Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and James MacPherson's "Poems of Ossian." Perhaps this is only a coincidence -- but it is a very unusual one, if that's what it is.

Page 19

Here we see a reproduction of page 155 from the Oberlin Spalding Manuscript. Only a few of the striking vocabulary and phraseology parallels with the Book of Mormon have been marked, but we can see that these occur all through the text in that page.

The phraseology parallels which are marked with red underlining are groups of two, three, and even four words which are found among the battle stories in both Spalding's novel and in the Book of Mormon.

Many of these battle story phrases are also in Homer's Iliad, Virgil's Aeneid, and James MacPherson's "Poems of Ossian."

Page 20

In a typescript of Spalding's page 155 these underlined phraseology parallels can be seen more clearly. Several of these bits of common phraseology are sequential in nature -- this is, they occur in the same relative order, both in the manuscript and in the Book of Mormon.

A few of these instances of sequential phraseology parallels are even more striking, because they occur in both texts at points where very similar stories are related.

Two of the most unusual textual fragments on this page also occur in the same context in Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad and in related stories in the Book of Mormon.

Page 21

In this illustration we see two pages from the book of Alma. The phraseology parallels with Spalding are underlined in red.

But there are also clusters of vocabulary which are not found in the Oberlin MS and which seem to convey ideas different from what we know of Spalding's ideas. In this example a cluster of blue underlined words on the second page indicates this kind of dissimilar phraseology.

By repeating this sorting out of vocabularies throughout the two texts we can begin to see which parts of the manuscript resemble the book and which parts of the book resemble the manuscript.

Page 22

Here are the same two Alma pages. After determining what kinds of contexts surround clusters of Spalding textual parallels in the Book of Mormon, we can add a yellow color to show where its text is the most "Spaldingish."

Where the book has clusters of dissimilar phraseology we can add green to the context for those words. Here green indicates the "non-Spaldingish" text in one Alma page.

The green text is religious material not typically found in Spalding. On the basis of redaction analysis we can label this a possible interpolation into a previously existing text. This is only an educated guess -- not proof.

Page 23

In this illustration we see a page from another part of the Book of Mormon -- this time from the book of Ether. As with the Alma text, the non-Spaldingish portion is colored green and the more Spaldingish text is colored yellow.

Again it appears that a block of religious material may have been interpolated into a battle story that otherwise very much resembles Spalding's writing.

However, this is only a guess. Whether the text is attributed to Spalding or not, this block of religious material might possibly be original and not a later addition.

Page 24

Here we return again to the book of Alma to view some smaller blocks of the green colored text flanking a much larger, possible editorial insertion.

The smaller green blocks are word groupings foreign to what we know of Spalding's ideas and vocabulary -- and which occur only very rarely in other Book of Mormon Spaldingish texts. However, such words occur frequently in the non-Spaldingish texts of the book.

For these reasons they may be considered possible additions, inserted to adapt the surrounding text and more easily allow a major redactional interpolation.

Page 25

The kind of textual analysis we applied to the Book of Mormon to locate Spaldingish texts can be extended to other sources as well. Here we have added two more colored bands to the plates diagram. The brown band represents a major cluster of quotes and phrases from the "King James" Old Testament. The blue band shows material from the New Testament.

The red band is not the only part in the book where we find Spaldingish text, but it is the largest concentration of that kind of wording. In the same way, the brown and blue bands represent major concentrations of biblical material -- but not the only places where biblical text is copied in the Book of Mormon.

Page 26

Here an Old Testament quote from the King James Bible is shown in brown and Book of Mormon additions foreign to the original are shown in green.

The main body of green and blue is the Book of Mormon's continuing flow of narrative. The smaller areas of green within the Old Testament quotation are redactional additions placed into the Isaiah text by a later hand.

Some Book of Mormon readers see these additions as original words, lost from the KJV Isaiah, and preserved only in the Book of Mormon. However, it is much more likely that they are later textual insertions.

Page 27

The idea that the Book of Mormon preserves the original Isaiah text has been challenged by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls Isaiah texts. These generally support the accepted Hebrew underlying the KJV rather than the altered Book of Mormon version.

Old Testament era baptism texts (such as this one in the LDS Book of Mormon printing of Isaiah 48:1) can also be viewed as late insertions into the KJV original.

It seems likely that editors who put altered biblical texts in Book of Mormon would also have copied altered texts from other sources.

Page 28

In previous examples we've seen what are probably evidences of straightforward textual redaction in the Mormon book. Here is a more complex example from the end of 1 Nephi.

Apparent borrowings from three different textual sources are indicated by the color underlinings. Here the Book of Mormon text seems to be an eclectic rendering of KJV Old and New Testament phrases along with fragments of Spaldingish vocabulary -- all set into the matrix of a Nephite narrative (green background).

The result reads something like a midrash of various scriptural voices, brought together to express a new variation of religious ideas.

click on above image to view larger graphic

Page 29

In this example the plates diagram is turned on its side to better show where the Book of Mormon texts resembling the KJV OT, KJV NT, and Spalding's writings are located.

As in the other diagrams, locations for the biblical-like texts are marked in brown and blue, while the Spaldingish texts are indicated with red. The green color represents either the undifferentialed Nephite narrative matrix or blocks of texts which have not been clearly identified in terms of their possible source material.

The most extensive, densely packed blocks of Spaldingish text begin in Alma XX.

click on above image to view larger graphic

Page 30

The block of Spaldingish text beginning in Alma and running almost continuously into Helaman begins and ends very near chapter breaks in the book. It starts with the Alma II war record and contains the records of Helaman I, Helaman II, and Shiblon.

The span of this Alma block of Spaldingish text corresponds closely with the life of the Nephite general, Moroni I, who is first introduced into the text for the year 73 BCE and who is recorded as dying in 56 BCE.

If these matches of Spaldingish text with distinct Book of Mormon records and Moroni's life are coincidental, they nevertheless form a highly regular pattern.

Page 31

In the examples shown so far, only biblical and Spalding similarities are marked. There are also numerous Book of Mormon parallels in the writings of Ethan Smith and in other 18th and 19th century English texts.

Once these similarities are precisely located in the Book of Mormon, they too could be charted on plates diagrams. Then we could see just where these parallels occur in the book and how their locations correspond to the textual material we've already looked at.

Textual block charting is only one tool used in Book of Mormon form and source criticism. We should remember it is only a tool and that its results do not "prove" the book's origins.

Page 32

Beginning in 3 Nephi we read the account of an alleged appearance of the risen Jesus Christ to the Nephites of America. Here we see the scene where Jesus descends from heaven, amid terrible death and destruction, shortly after his resurrection in Palestine.

Without going into details here, we can simply note that the Jesus of this story appears to be rather different from the pre-crucifixion teacher of the Christian gospel stories.

When we look at the likely redactional patterns in this section of the Book of Mormon, we can see some possible reasons for this story's strangely different Jesus.

Page 33

In this part of the Book of Mormon Jesus visits the Nephite people and presents them with his teachings. Much of what he says is simply the recounting of altered text copied into Nephite record from KJV NT sources.

A good deal of this textual alteration appears as editorial additions which stress morality and legal matters at the expense of the idea that Jesus was the fulfillment of the Mosaic law.

Indeed, the book primarily quotes from a narrow selection of NT sources which favor the apocalyptic image of Messiahship.

Page 34

If we are going to make a decision about whether or not to trust and follow the teachings of Jesus presented in the Book of Mormon, we should first be certain we are hearing his actual words there.

When we see what look like editorial additions to collected teachings resembling the NT "sermon on the mount," we should investigate to see how and why those additions were made.

The Book of Mormon text differs significantly from similar biblical texts on important religious matters, but that in itself does not disqualify the book from being scriptural.

Page 35

Even if we do not accept the Book of Mormon as containing an historically true account of ancient Americans and the previously unknown words of Jesus, we may still classify it as a certain type of scriptural work.

Seen as a latter-day equivalent to canonical writings such as Deuteronomy, Jonah, Daniel, or the Book of Revelation, the Nephite story can be shown to hold many similarities with accepted scripture.

If we accept the book as scripture on this basis, we should remember that its apocalyptic Christ of the clouds represents only a narrow view of Jesus, not the full range of biblical experience.

Page 36

We started this study by seeing it as a story -- the story of Joseph Smith, jr., a young man with a vision and the unquenchable thirst to reestablish Christ's original church.

But it is also a story of a mysterious former clergyman named Solomon Spalding -- a man who composed fictional scriptures in his writings.

And it is the story of people like Sidney Rigdon, who found his dreams realized in the pages of the Book of Mormon. There have been many like him in the past and there will be many more. The story has not ended.

Page 37

If Jesus came in fulfillment of the scriptures, he also labored to set us free from our misunderstandings of many things written in those special writings. He never wrote a book himself. For books alone can never be perfect witnesses to God's revelation of love.

The Book of Mormon has always been a powerful missionary tool; it will likely continue to serve this purpose for many years to come. It also turns our attention to the noble cause of building a latter-day Zion, not only in the hills of Palestine, but around the world. A road map as valuable as this one should not be discarded just because we've noticed that it has some flaws.

Page 38

In the end we each must make up our own minds and hearts about what will prove useful in our journey to find God. Some of us will rely greatly on what others have told us, both in person and through their writings.

Some of us will make the spiritual trek without the weight of so many books in our backpacks.

However we choose to travel, it's important to remember that we are not alone -- and that in helping each other we help ourselves along the way.

Return to: SRP Paper 15: Introduction