September 5, 2015

I've been downloading and listening to the the Ensign lately on my way to work.  In my busy schedule it has been hard to read it so this is a great way to keep up with my spirituality.  Anyway, I was listening to past issues and in the July, 2015 there is a great article entitled The Coming Forth of the Book of Mormon by Matthew S. Holland.  He quoted a scholar on the complexity of the Book of Mormon that I found fascinating as I pondered what he had to say.  I thought I would share it with you.  It has only confirmed my testimony that The Book of Mormon is true and the word of God.  Enjoy!

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According to one recent scholarly summary, here is what Joseph effectively produced in those 65 working days of translation: “Not only are there more than a thousand years of history [in the Book of Mormon] involving some two hundred named individuals and nearly a hundred distinct places, but the narrative itself is presented as the work of three primary editor/historians—Nephi, Mormon, and Moroni. These figures, in turn, claim to have based their accounts on dozens of preexisting records. The result is a complex mix that incorporates multiple genres ranging from straightforward narration to inserted sermons and letters to scriptural commentary and poetry. It requires considerable patience to work out all the details of chronology, geography, genealogy, and source records, but the Book of Mormon is remarkably consistent on all this. The chronology is handled virtually without glitches, despite several flashbacks and temporally overlapping narratives; … and the narrators keep straight both the order and family connections among the twenty-six Nephite record keepers and forty-one Jaredite kings (including rival lines). The complexity is such that one would assume the author worked from charts and maps, though Joseph Smith’s wife … explicitly denied that he had written something out beforehand that he either had memorized or consulted as he translated, and indeed she claimed that Joseph began sessions of dictation without looking at the manuscript or having the last passage read back to him.”

And this is to say nothing of the presence of highly sophisticated literary structures and striking parallels with ancient customs and forms of communication, among other things, associated with the book and its translation.

In the face of this, one simply has to ask, how did a man—especially one with practically no formal education—accomplish such a feat?

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As a man he could not, but only as the Prophet of God that he was!