Forty years of Book of Mormon wordprint studies, misses included. Function words and word-pattern ratios keep finding many distinct authors and no match for Joseph Smith. The one study that found a single author used a method that picked the right known author only 23% of the time. Part 4 of 10.
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Critics say every historian knows Joseph Smith was a fraud. The historians say something else. From Josiah Quincy’s “phenomenon to be explained” to Jan Shipps’s “Prophet Puzzle,” Harold Bloom’s “religious genius,” and even Fawn Brodie’s “mythmaker of prodigious talent,” here is how non-LDS scholars moved from “impostor” to something much harder to dismiss, and why it matters.
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In February 1879, a few months before she died, Emma Smith answered her son’s questions about the Book of Mormon. Joseph’s first scribe said he dictated “hour after hour” with his face in a hat, the plates wrapped in her linen tablecloth, and “neither manuscript nor book to read from.” She never went west, split with Brigham Young, and still never denied the book. Plus the polygamy objection, answered honestly.
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In June 1844 Joseph Smith was safe across the Mississippi in Iowa, with horses ordered for the trip west. He went back, told his brother “we shall be butchered,” and rode to Carthage saying “I am going like a lamb to the slaughter.” A con man runs. Joseph walked toward death with Hyrum, a witness of the plates, and never recanted the Book of Mormon.
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In 2008 a Stanford paper said the Book of Mormon’s style pointed to Sidney Rigdon and Solomon Spalding. But its method could only pick from the names it was given, and Joseph Smith wasn’t one of them. When reviewers let the computer answer “someone else,” 93% of the chapters outside Isaiah went there. Part 3 of 10.
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