- Dale R. Broadhurst's  SPALDING  RESEARCH  PROJECT -






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)

- Part Three -





Return to Part Two: Pages 8 - 15

Return to: SRP Paper 15: Introduction

slide 16

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.



slide 17

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.



slide 18

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.




slide 19

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."




slide 20

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.




slide 21

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.




slide 22

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.




Go to Part Four: Pages 23 - 29


Return to: SRP Paper 15: Introduction