Joseph Smith's (claimed) revelation vs. the Book of Mormon

Stephen Prothero in the WSJ on archaeological evidences and Mormonism...

I've talked a lot over the years with Mormons / Latter-Day Saints. One conversation comes to mind as I read this review by Prothero: a colleague and good friend expressed amazement that Evangelicals are so interested in archaeology, saying that Mormons don't pay any attention to that. My response-- half-tongue-in-cheek-- was that Mormons don't go there because the evidence is not friendly to their faith.

That said, here is a review of an amazing scholarly effort-- to go back to the original revelation claimed by Joseph Smith, which differs from what one would read today in the Book of Mormon.

Any claim of revelation is outrageous. It presumes that God exists, that God speaks and that all is not lost when human beings translate that speech into ordinary language. But time mutes the outrage, or muffles it. Many of us greet the miracles of Jesus with a shrug, and there is little scandal any more in claiming that the Bible is the word of God.

Not so with the Book of Mormon. Joseph Smith Jr., the founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the most successful of America's home-grown religions, may not have been hounded by paparazzi, but the scripture that he brought into the world (as translator, not writer, Mormons insist) was born in an age of newspapers and before a cloud of witnesses. In fact, before the book was typeset it was drawing defenders and detractors alike. So we probably know more about the production of the Book of Mormon, which is holy writ to the world's 14 million Mormons, than we do about any other scripture. With the Yale University Press publication of "The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text" last month, we know even more.

The product of over two decades of painstaking labor by Royal Skousen—a Brigham Young University professor of linguistics and English language, a Mormon...

Mr. Skousen draws on the first three editions of the Book of Mormon (1830, 1837 and 1840), but most of his work is based on two handwritten sources: the original manuscript dictated by Smith and written down by scribes; and a printer's manuscript, copied from the original....the printer's manuscript was, according to the typesetter, "one solid paragraph, without a punctuation mark, from beginning to end." It is largely intact, but only 28% of the original manuscript survives. The rest was consumed by the elements after Smith placed it in the cornerstone of a Nauvoo, Ill., hotel in 1841.

All sorts of errors popped up between the moment Smith uttered the first words of his translation and the moment the first edition went to press, and the text continued to be transformed with each new edition. In one case, Smith's scribes heard "weed" instead of "reed." In other cases, they heard Smith right but wrote down the wrong word. Meanwhile, Smith's publisher, trying to improve his spelling and grammar, introduced errors of his own. Later Smith made hundreds of his own changes, chiefly by transforming some of the first edition's King James style into more standard American English.

In an effort to take us back as close as possible to what Smith saw when he was dictating to his scribes, this new edition restores much of the nonstandard English that the church edited out over time. It also gets rid of the chapter summaries, columns and notes added by LDS leaders...

The Yale edition differs from the standard text in over 2,000 places, but almost all of these differences are inconsequential ("inequality" becomes "unequality," for example). Even where a change is substantive—"sword" of justice becomes "word" of justice—nothing hangs on the change theologically....

One conclusion to draw from this fact is that Mr. Skousen wasted two decades of his life; this oversize, 848-page book is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Another is that the Book of Mormon has been vindicated, warts and all. Mormons have long acknowledged that the Book of Mormon has a textual history. They admit that there were grammatical and spelling errors in the first edition, and that the text has changed over time. But it has now been proved through painstaking scholarship that none of these changes amount to a hill of beans....

Mr. Skousen told me that this project gave him "a bit of heartburn" because LDS leaders didn't want him to publish it. "They have a history of controlling the text," he explained. And this new edition did leave me wondering which text is now the real Mormon scripture....it is "very unlikely" that the LDS Church will ever make this version its official Book of Mormon. Nonetheless, according to Mr. Skousen's preface, it is the original text—the one he is attempting to unearth—that, for believers, "has authoritative status as a revelation."...