Linguistics and the Book of Mormon

According to most adherents of the Latter Day Saint movement, the Book of Mormon is a 19th-century translation of a record of ancient inhabitants of the American continent, which was written in a script which the book refers to as "reformed Egyptian". Mainstream modern linguistic evidence has failed to find any evidence of a language matching this description – or indeed, any evidence of Old World linguistic influences in the New World whatsoever.

Some proponents of the Book of Mormon have published claims of stylistic forms that they think Joseph Smith and his contemporaries were unlikely to have known about, in particular things they think are similar to Egyptian and Hebrew. However, the Book of Mormon includes language that is anachronistic and reflective of its 19th-century and English-language origins consistent with Smith's upbringing and life experience, as well as the books and other literature published just preceding the time that the Book of Mormon was published.

Native American language


In 1922, LDS Church general authority B. H. Roberts (1857–1933) conducted a review of the research regarding language development and dialects among the Native American peoples; the University of Illinois Press published Roberts's study posthumously in 1985 as Studies of the Book of Mormon.

Roberts based his discussion on the assumption that the majority of Native Americans descend from the peoples described in the Book of Mormon – as is implied by the hemispheric model of Book of Mormon geography, which was the prevailing view among Mormons at the time. Roberts noted that linguistic evidence among the Native American peoples does not support the Book of Mormon narrative, inasmuch as the diverse language stocks and dialects that exist would not have had enough time to develop from a single language dating from A.D. 400 (the approximate date of the conclusion of the Book of Mormon record). Roberts noted:

"The facts ... developed up to this point seem to be—

1. That there are a large number of separate language stocks in America that show very little relationship to each other.

2. That it would take a long time—much longer than that recognized as "historic times"—to develop these dialects and stocks where the development is conceived of as arising from a common source of origin—some primitive language.

3. That there is no connection between the American languages and the language of any people of the Old World. New World languages appear to be indigenous to the New World.

4. That the time limits named in the Book of Mormon—which represents the people of America as speaking and writing one language down to as late a period as 400 A.D.—is not sufficient to allow for these divergences into the American language stocks and their dialects."

The fragmentation of language into many groups in the pre-Colombian Americas is at odds with a hemispherical geography model of the Book of Mormon’s peoples – and indeed with the Book of Mormon’s narrative of agricultural Nephites coming to the Americas and building a large-scale society. In Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist Jared Diamond writes that “had any food-producing Native American peoples succeeded in spreading far with their crops and livestock and rapidly replacing hunter-gatherers over a large area, they would have left legacies of easily recognized language families, as in Eurasia,” which did not occur.

Mainstream investigations hold that there is no known special similarity between Native American languages and ancient Egyptian.

Linguistic anachronisms
A variety of linguistic anachronisms exist in it which show that it is the product of nineteenth century American authorship. These anachronisms include words that represent concepts that did not exist in the Americas between 2500 BC and AD 400, or in ancient Israel and Judah.

"Christ" and "Messiah"
The words "Christ" and "Messiah" are used several hundred times throughout the Book of Mormon. The first instance of the word "Christ" occurs in parts of the narrative that many Mormons attribute to between 559 and 545 BC. The first instance of the word "Messiah" occurs in the narrative that Mormons believe happened around 600 BC.

"Christ" is the English transliteration of the Greek word Χριστός (transliterated as Christós); it is relatively synonymous with the Hebrew word משיח, pronounced and rendered "Messiah". Both words have the meaning of "anointed", and are used in the Bible to refer to "the Anointed One". In Greek translations of the Old Testament (including the Septuagint), the word "Christ" is used for the Hebrew "Messiah", and in Hebrew translations of the New Testament, the word "Messiah" is used for the Greek "Christ". Any passage in the Bible that uses the word "Christ" can substitute the word "Messiah" or "the Messiah" with no change in meaning (e.g., ).

The Book of Mormon uses both terms throughout the book. In the vast majority of cases, it uses the terms in an identical manner as the Bible, where it does not matter which word is used:

"And now, my sons, remember, remember that it is upon the rock of our Redeemer, who is Christ, the Son of God, that ye must build your foundation".."

"And after he had baptized the Messiah with water, he should behold and bear record that he had baptized the Lamb of God, who should take away the sins of the world."."

Richard Packham argues that the Greek word "Christ" in the Book of Mormon challenges the authenticity of the work since Smith clearly stated that "there was no Greek or Latin upon the plates from which I, through the grace of the Lord, translated the Book of Mormon."

"Church" and "synagogue"
The word "church" first occurs in 1 Nephi 4:26, where a prophet named Nephi disguises himself as Laban, a prominent man in Jerusalem whom Nephi had slain:

"And he [Laban's servant], supposing that I spake of the brethren of the church, and that I was truly that Laban whom I had slain, wherefore he did follow me."

According to the Book of Mormon, this exchange happened in Jerusalem, around 600 BC. The meaning of the word "church" in the Book of Mormon is more comparable to usage in the Bible than Modern English. The concept of a church, meaning "a convocation of believers", existed among the House of Israel prior to Christianity. For instance, Psalms speaks of praising the Lord "in the congregation of the saints"; the Septuagint contains the Greek word ecclesia for "congregation", which is also translated as "church" in the New Testament.

A similar question regards the word "synagogue", found in Alma 16:13:

"And Alma and Amulek went forth preaching repentance to the people in their temples, and in their sanctuaries, and also in their synagogues, which were built after the manner of the Jews."

Synagogues did not exist in their modern form before the destruction of the temple and the Babylonian captivity. The oldest known synagogue is located in Delos, Greece, and has been dated to 150 BC.

Other anachronisms
Craig L. Blomberg has pointed out several verses in the Book Mormon apparently similar to biblical verses in the King James version of the Bible. According to Blomberg, includes overt references to, , , and were most likely written with their direct influence in mind. Furthermore, Blomberg claims that contains allusions to. Blomberg summarizes his overall position on Book of Mormon anachronisms as follows: "Indeed, the entire Book of Mormon abounds with explicit references to Christ, to his life and ministry and to the three persons of the Godhead long before New Testament times ... even though none of these concepts or terms ever appear in these forms in the Old Testament or any other ancient Jewish literature."

Chiasmus
In 1969, John W. Welch discovered a variety of instances of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon and along with his discovery came attention to the phenomenon. The most commonly cited example of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon is the prophet Alma's religious experience, as recorded in. Welch claims that it is unlikely, although not impossible, that Smith knew about chiasmus at the time of the Book of Mormon's publication, which implies that chiasmus could only be present in the text if indeed the text is a translation and not a fabrication.

Critics argue that chiasmus is not necessarily evidence of Hebrew origin.

Still others disagree on the extent to which chiasmus occurs in the text. With regard to the Alma chapter 36 chiasmus, one critic alleges that Welch "fashioned a chiasm by selecting elements from repetitious language, creatively labeling elements, ignoring text, pairing unbalanced elements, and even including asymmetrical elements".

Welch himself offers the following caution regarding a tendency of enthusiastic readers to see chiasmus where it is not actually present:

"Some people, of course, have gone overboard with this search, and caution must be employed; otherwise, it is possible to find chiasmus in the telephone book, and the effort becomes meaningless . ... One must be careful in this quest, however, to avoid the problems of the 'hammer syndrome'—to the person holding a hammer, everything looks like a nail. To the person who knows only chiasmus and no other form of literary composition, everything may start looking like a chiasm."

Occurrence in other LDS scriptures
Some claim writings in the form of chiasmus can also be found in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, two other works of scripture in the LDS canon that were dictated by Smith. Critics believe this supports their claim that Smith knew about chiasmus, and that it may have been a characteristic of his personal writing style.

Charles G. Kroupa and Richard C. Shipp are notable for publishing arguments for chiasmus in the Doctrine and Covenants in 1972. In 1975, Shipp affirmed that writings found in the Doctrine and Covenants also had literary patterns similar to chiasmus. In 2004, a study was published by LDS researchers which used statistical analysis to determine the likelihood that a chiastic structure in LDS works appeared by chance as opposed to being created deliberately. The authors concluded “that the likelihood is high that chiastic structure appeared by design in the Pentateuch and in the Book of Mormon. Our estimates do not support such a conclusion for the Doctrine and Covenants [or] the Book of Abraham ... indicating instead that chiasms could have appeared in these works by chance.”

Other works containing chiasmus
Chiastic patterns have also been found in the Book of the Law of the Lord, a purported translation of an ancient text by James J. Strang. This book is not considered authentic by the LDS Church, the Community of Christ or any Latter Day Saint sect other than the Strangite church.

Critics point out that the presence of chiasmus in Strang's writing as well as in the literature of other cultures implies that the source could be non-Hebrew. Additionally, that the presence of chiasmus is not necessarily indicative of ancient origins.

Stylometry
In 1980, researchers at LDS Church-owned Brigham Young University used stylometric techniques they called "wordprint analysis" to examine possible Book of Mormon authorship, through statistical analysis of the occurrence of specific words and phrases. They concluded that none of the Book of Mormon selections they studied resembled writings of any of the suggested nineteenth-century authors, including Joseph Smith. Jerald and Sandra Tanner challenged these findings on various points, most notably questioning the reliability of the data sources used and the methodology of the "wordprint analysis". Additionally, D. James Croft wrote in Sunstone that there were several flaws in the methodology that were vulnerable to criticism.

A later stylometric study was undertaken by Mormon researcher John Hilton and his non-LDS colleagues at Berkeley, who "went to great pains to immunize the methodology from criticism" through the use of control tests. Hilton concluded that, if wordprinting is a valid technique, then this analysis suggests that it is "statistically indefensible" to claim that Smith, Oliver Cowdery, or Solomon Spalding wrote the 30,000 words in the Book of Mormon attributed to Nephi and Alma.

In a peer-reviewed study using a traditional authorship method and a new pattern-classification technique, several researchers at Stanford University concluded that Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, and Oliver Cowdery were more likely to have written the book out of a pool of authors that also included Parley P. Pratt and two statistical control authors (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Joel Barlow). Smith was not included in the pool of authors because a set of original works written by Smith alone could not be identified with confidence. However, this study only examined the relative likelihood of the five above-mentioned authors writing the Book of Mormon, not the possibility of an author or authors outside the five-person pool. Another study was published in the same journal that critiqued the methodology used in the earlier study and, using Smith's personal writings written in his own handwriting, concluded that stylometric evidence supports neither Smith nor a Spalding–Rigdon authorship.

In a 1991 study for the journal History and Computing, non-Mormon David Holmes used a multivariate technique to analyze the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of the Covenants. He concluded that they were from the same author, Joseph Smith. He noted that “the style of [Smith’s] 'prophetic voice' as evidenced by the main cluster of the textual samples studied, differs from the style of his personal writings or dictations of a personal nature.”

Proper names
Apologists have argued that apparent similarities between proper names found in the Book of Mormon, and names from known ancient civilizations (which presumably Smith would not have known about) can be an argument for the book's ancient historicity. Conversely, critics have pointed out the appearance of names in the Book of Mormon which appear to be anachronistic.

Language specialists discourage the use of small non-random lists of words to compare two separate languages.

Hebrew names
Critics have pointed out that many of the names in the Book of Mormon that are not drawn from the King James Bible are found in the local environment around Palmyra, New York, and would have been known to Smith. Richard Packham has pointed out that several Biblical Hebrew names, including "Aaron", "Ephraim", and "Levi" are listed as Jaredites in the Book of Ether. He argues that these are anachronisms, since the Jaredites are supposed to have originated from the time of the Tower of Babel, and presumably did not speak Hebrew. In addition, Packham has pointed out that while "Isabel" is derived from the ancient Hebrew Elizabeth, the name Isabel did not exist until 12th century Spain, which he argues is evidence against the authenticity of the Book of Mormon.

Egyptian names
In his book Lehi in the Desert, Mormon apologist Hugh Nibley compares names found in the Book of Mormon with ancient Egyptian names from Upper Egypt. The comparisons allegedly show that many names in the Book of Mormon are similar to names in a certain region and era of ancient Egypt.

Smith, in a letter written in 1843 to the Mormon publication Millennial Star, wrote that the name "Mormon" came from "the Egyptian Mon, hence with the addition of more, or the contraction, mor, we have the word Mormon, which means, literally, more good." Benjamin Urrutia suggests the name "Mormon" is derived from Egyptian "mor" ("love") and mon ("firmly established"), rendering "Mormon" as "love is firmly established." Packham criticizes Smith's interpretation, stating that the English word "more" or "mor" is out of place in an Egyptian name.

Greek names
In 1843, Smith stated publicly "there was no Greek or Latin upon the plates from which I... translated the Book of Mormon." Richard Packham has pointed out that the Book of Mormon contains some Greek and Latin names, some of which are hellenizations of Hebrew names (e.g., "Antipas", "Archeantus", "Esrom", "Ezias", "Judea", and "Zenos") and some of which are Greek or Latin.