Wordprint or stylometry studies try to identify the author of a text. Studies have tried to prove ancient as well as modern authorship. What does Brian Hales think of these studies? Is there a gap in Book of Mormon authorship?
GT: Well, I know there’s been a lot of wordprint studies trying to identify [a specific author.] There was the Stanford study that said, “Oh, see, Solomon Spalding was the real author.” Whereas, then BYU guys used the same methodology, but they included a “none of the above,” and, I think, pretty much blew the Stanford guys out of the water on that. But it seems to me, and I don’t know how you feel about word print studies. There are a lot of BYU guys that say, “Well, there’s 30 authors. We can show there’s 30 different authors of the Book of Mormon.” Then, you have the Stanford guys who are like, “No, it’s Solomon Spalding.” Do you have any point of view on word print studies?
Brian: Well, they call them stylometrics, and I only include four, mostly because as I’m reading those four authors, I can even detect some differences that a person making up the text would have to take into account. There are two studies that, as you said, are saying it was written by Joseph or by Spalding or by Rigdon. Then, there are studies by Church members that show different authors, and it couldn’t be Joseph. I don’t put a lot of stock into it. But again, I can tell a difference of how Nephi is writing in his books versus how Mormon is compiling in his sections.
GT: I will just say if this was something that was a valid science, I think the FBI would have done that for Mark Hofmann.
Brian: (Chuckling) Well, and maybe you know, but I heard. Who was it? Mark Hofmann had paid somebody $5,000 to try to break down the sentence structure of the Book of Mormon, and he’d made hundreds and hundreds of three by five cards that were catalogued. Who was that?
GT: That was Brent Ashworth.
Brian: Brent, and so you can see that just to try to imitate 116 pages of the Book of Mormon, the amount of work Mark Hofmann was going to go to, the best forger of this era. So, I think he’s showing us this wouldn’t have been easy to do in the first place, let alone try to imitate it in the second place, as Hofmann was maybe planning to do, because he could do Martin Harris’ handwriting. But, creating those actual sentences is a whole ‘nother ballgame, rather than just writing.
What are your impressions of Wordprint studies? Are they valid?
Many critics point out that there are anachronisms in the Book of Mormon. Native Americans didn’t use steel, there were not horses, elephants, etc, so why are they mentioned in the Book of Mormon?
Brian: For me, I think anachronisms are the weakest criticism of the Book of Mormon for several reasons. First off, we haven’t done all of the excavations, yet. Some of these items, maybe not all of them, but some of them could still be discovered. They have LIDAR studies of Northern Guatemala and the Yucatan of Mexico. These LIDAR studies show that there are people that lived there, seven to 11 million [people] in a 40,000 square mile radius area, and 3% to 5% of those have been excavated. So, there’s, there’s lots of things that still could be discovered in the anachronisms. Another reason I think anachronisms are weak is that if you’ve ever translated from one language to another, some of the literal qualities of an item may be lost, or new literal qualities may be gained. You know, silk, did they have silkworms there? Probably not. Did they have shiny material? Maybe so. So, some of these things can be explained away.
Brian: Now, you mentioned horses, a great example. Because what we find in the Book of Mormon, horses, I think are mentioned 11 times, and they are mentioned with chariots. There’s no mention of wheels. But what’s interesting is in Joseph’s day, a horse was ridden. A horse would pull a wagon with wheels. It was used in cavalry, you know, to ride in battle. Well, we don’t find any of those things in the Book of Mormon. You don’t ride on horses, so far as it says in the Book of Mormon, they are only associated with royalty and with a chariot of some sort. We don’t know exactly. People make assumptions of wheels. They think Ben Hur, and all of this. We don’t know what the word chariot signifies.
GT: I mean, if they came from the old world, wouldn’t you expect Ben Hur to be in America with chariots? Because the Egyptians pulled chariots with horses, right? I mean, wouldn’t you expect the same sort of thing in America?
Brian: Well, chariots are mentioned so seldom, that I don’t know that we should assume they have wheels. If they had wheels, don’t we think we would probably have more mention of the use of the wheel in the Book of Mormon? We don’t. We’re making an assumption there. I understand, but this could be just translation on the word chariot. The chariot is only mentioned, I think, four times. We’d have to go back and look. So, again, this particular anachronism, to me is not a real problem, because the horses in the Book of Mormon are not doing what horses did in Joseph Smith’s day.
We’ll also talk about the concepts of tight vs loose translation. In tight translation, God provided every word of the Book of Mormon, but in loose translation, Joseph used some of his intellect to translate the Book of Mormon. Does Brian prefer tight or loose translation? Do you prefer tight, loose, or some other authorship theory? Why?
Wheat & Tares 
It is absolute utter nonsense to claim that God mistranslated the Book of Mormon by including anachronisms.
It is ridiculous to cite archeological studies as proof of millions of inhabitants living in an area, and then discount archeological studies that have found no proof of horses or steel. You can’t have it both ways.
As one who is rooting for the home team (in a general sense), I admire apologists like Brian Hales for fighting the good fight. Because they are generally preaching to the choir, both apologists and the choir might get the impression LDS apologetic arguments are persuasive or convincing. In fact, that is almost the never the case for a skeptical or critical audience, or even an objective one. That probably holds true for almost any religion’s or denomination’s apologetics, but it is certainly more evident for LDS apologetics because, well, there’s just a lot more that LDS apologists have to defend. And the list of what needs defending seems to be growing, not shrinking, over time.
The whole apologetic enterprise looks different in light of recent events, where about half of Republicans (and a larger percentage of Mormons, who supported Trump disproportionately and continue to do so) accept the weak and almost entirely fact-less claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election. It is now painfully obvious you don’t need a convincing argument to sway Mormons/Republicans. If they want to believe, bad arguments work. Fact-free arguments work. Stupid arguments work. LDS apologetics are directed to the same large group of conservative Republican Mormons that buy the groundless, fact-less, stupid claims Trump and his cronies continue to push to gullible listeners. LDS apologetics works because it’s directed to a gullible audience that wants to believe and who are blissfully unconcerned with facts.
I wish Mormon curriculum and LDS apologists would work to educate and elevate Mormon readers and listeners rather than defend the orthodox Mormon narrative at all costs, with any and all arguments. LDS apologists might be fighting the good fight, but I think it’s the wrong fight.
The argument that anachronisms in the BoM aren’t really anachronisms because the words used are stand-ins for other things (horses might mean tapirs, chariots might mean any number of things, we don’t know!) doesn’t really hold any water because of words like curelom and cumom. If the “translation” was tight enough to render curelom as a completely new word (and not an anachronistic substitution like mastodon), why not refer to horses and chariots by their Nephite names?
The most obvious explanation for the inconsistencies is that JS was working from his imagination and his limited knowledge of the Biblical Old World. Of course he wouldn’t describe horses the way they were used in the 1800s. He described them the way the Bible does—often pulled by chariots. If the BoM is historical, God sure went to a lot of trouble to make the evidence suggest otherwise. To me that seems more the move of a cunning trickster god than a loving father intent on leading and guiding us back to Him.
*pulling chariots
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. When your theory starts with the position that the church has to be true, and you work backwards to support that claim, you end up with this kind of scholarship. When you start with an actual hypothesis “ie is the Book of Mormon a historical document” you remove the bias and can let the facts speak for themselves. This is why BYU scholars and all other scholars constantly come to different conclusions. Because the process they employ is completely different.
Also, what Kirkstall says about curelom and cumom.
The only way apologists can make the BOM work is if they admit that both tight and loose translation methodologies were used (see below). I find that to be a strange explanation.
A loose process allows for the many many corrections that have transpired since the original manuscript. And it allows for the use of outside sources to influence JS’s writings. When critics point out that there are many similarities between the BOM and View of the Hebrews and the KJV Bible, apologists can defend the work by stating that JS was loosely referencing these as he received “revelation”.
And a tight process allows for such things as the word “cumom” and “senum”, words that were so exact and unique that could only be explained by a letter for letter word for word process. Besides, Emma Smith and David Whitmer stated that JS translated this way.
You have to decide whether it is reasonable that Joseph Smith used two different translation processes to construct the BOM. I find it hard to believe that the creator of the universe revealed His most correct book via a a stone in a hat using both tight and loose methods but maybe I just need more faith.
I’ve heard stylistic drift, the notion that an author’s style changes as they produce a manuscript, invoked as a rebuttal to Wordprint studies. I’ve also seen computer-based studies that analyze styles across thousands of books only to show that the closest books stylistically to the Book of Mormon are the Doctrine and Covenants and the Book of Abraham. I think the apologists are misreading Wordprint data and are extrapolating well beyond the parameters of what the data show. Additional I’ve seen studies that show that Wordprint studies don’t detect deliberate deception well. They are useful for helping us understand authorship of the Federalist Papers, but not forgeries.
The claim that Joseph Smith couldn’t have possibly written in a different style (I most certainly think he could have and did) is not evidence that ancient Americans were Christians nor is it evidence that they were visited by Jesus himself.
@Observer
Keep in mind that absence of evidence is not evidence. Claiming that the fact that something has not been found in an area is proof that it will be found in that area is the epitome of ridiculousness.
Trish, through use of LIDAR, it has been very recently determined that far more people lived in the Mesoamerica area than previously realized. That was not determined through digs or traditional archaeological methods. As Brian stated, precious little of that area has been excavated and surely much more lies to be discovered. We don’t know what we don’t know. I don’t find Brian’s statements ridiculous at all.
Re Observer’s comment: It’s true that we don’t know what we don’t know. But it’s also true that any “scholar” who begins with the assumption that the B of M is true isn’t a scholar and can’t be objective about the issue. Yes, it’s true that all scholars have their biases, blind spots, etc., but that’s different from beginning with an assumption unsupported by any objective scholarly tradition. And Kirkstall’s right that in the rush to perform any number of mental gymnastics to pin a slim hope of truth onto the B of M, apologists devalue and compromise traditional LDS views of God. This is all really just a rabbit hole that some people like to go down because it gives them some sort of “proof” that their beliefs are legitimate. And Dave B. is correct that these strains of thought and ways of looking at things ultimately only make us look even more gullible and foolish than we do already. It’s simply not helpful.
Trish, I’m not saying absence of evidence is necessarily evidence. I am saying that the claims/arguments that Brian is laying out does not equal to having it both ways.
Observer, sorry for jumping in to a conversation you were having with Trish, but this is puzzling to me and I’m not content to wait. How is it not having it both ways?
Observer, what has been discovered by LIDAR technology seems to debunk what the Book of Mormon claims rather than confirm it.
Consider this article here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.sciencenews.org/article/lidar-reveals-oldest-biggest-ancient-maya-structure-found-mexico/amp
The claims are that LIDAR technology discovered a raised ceremonial mound in Mayan-inhabited areas that was built 3,000 years ago. That predates Lehi’s arrival by about 400 years. LIDAR technology also found that Mayan civilization was much more populated than believed to be and that it flourished between 250 and 900 CE. According to the Book of Mormon inhabitants of the Americas were supposed to have dwindled and suffered casualties in the tens of thousands due to Lamanite-Nephite wars by the year 400 CE. The discovery of a flourishing civilization that lasted up to 900 presents a serious challenge to the Book of Mormon claim, doesn’t it?
I know it is fashionable among some here to complain that apologists “starts with the position that the church has to be true, and you work backwards to support that claim, you end up with this kind of scholarship.” While this can be true among some apologists, but it is also true that some critics “starts with the position that the church has to be FALSE, and you work backwards to support that claim, you end up with this kind of scholarship.”
I think the Jockers Stanford study is a perfect example of shoddy scholarship among critics. So is the Spalding Conspiracy theory, which was debunked by none other than Fawn Brodie, and no historians support this garbage. No one group has a monopoly on shoddy scholarship.
As for Wordprint studies in general, I think they are typically quite biased in favor of the authors. Critics gonna be critical, while believers are gonna believe. I find Wordprint studies interesting, but none of them are slam dunks. I don’t think are a useful metric about anything conclusive except the author’s biases, and I would hope some here would be a little more humble about their scowling at people they disagree with, and admit the mistakes of people with whom they might share biases.
Dave B: Trump? Really? God, let that worn out narrative die. And, no I don’t care for him…..I’m just sick of the drumbeat.
I suggest that Mormon apologists and scholars concentrate on something other than BoM historicity and let the history chips fall where they may. Being overly defensive doesn’t serve the Church well. And many arguments proposed by apologists seem very desperate.
Rick B: It’s a fair comment you make in quoting my comment. I want you to know I don’t make the comment to be en vogue; that’s just my limited experience in engaging with the data. Please forgive my ignorance in this matter, as I’m a CPA by trade and only dabble in Mormon scholarship as time permits. While I personally don’t know of any scholars that start with the position that the Church is false and work backward, I suppose they could exist. I don’t believe I follow any of them, but I could be wrong. Can you name a few for my education? I fully acknowledge that some critics follow this method.
On the same topic, are you aware of any believing scholars that don’t start with the premise that the Church is true? Can you point me to their work?
I don’t mean to put a burden on you in this way. I just don’t know what I don’t know.
” While I personally don’t know of any scholars that start with the position that the Church is false and work backward, I suppose they could exist.”
I don’t know of ANY apologists or critics who claim that they start with a position that the Church is true/false and work backward. At least nobody admits that. They all state they are “following where the evidence leads.” That includes Brian Hales, Dan Vogel, Sandra Tanner, Ugo Perego, etc, etc. The only people who claim that that scholars start with a position and work backwards are critics of their position. Trust me, Brian, Dan, Sandra, Ugo, and countless others complain about their critics. So I think it is a red herring to claim that anyone states that they work backward from a premise. But, all scholars (pro or anti) have a believing or unbelieving bias, and I think they all admit to that. There is no such thing as an unbiased person (me included.) We simply try to be fair–and EVERYONE thinks they are being fair. I find charges that ANY scholar “works backwards” to be a simple ad hominem attack without any basis in fact.
Now, as to the subject of Wordprint studies, I don’t know how familiar you are with them. When the Jockers study came out, they used a theory that the Spalding Theory (which I believe has been thoroughly discredited for decades, if not a century) was useful. I suppose critics could call it working backwards, although I’m sure Jockers, Criddle, and Witten wouldn’t appreciate that characterization. In essence, they were trying to prove that Sidney Rigdon got a Spalding manuscript, surreptitiously gave it to Joseph, and that Rigdon/Spalding were the real authors of the Book of Mormon. They set out to prove it, and voila! According to their flawed study, Rigdon was magically the author! They created a mathematical technique with a lot of buzzwords and a procedure used to detect cancer to make their conclusions. It was certainly a novel approach that had never been tried before.
But there was a fatal flaw in the study, and the BYU guys exposed it. Here was the flaw. They took 5-6 people that they thought were possible authors (ironically excluding Joseph Smith because they said they couldn’t get enough of his writing, which was likely true, but wow, what a problem!) Up came Sidney as the author. The BYU guys noted that if these same 5-6 people were used to see who wrote The Federalist Papers, and voila! Sidney was the author of that too. BYU took their procedure, and added a “none of the above” option. And when you do that, Sidney wrote neither the Federalist Papers nor the Book of Mormon. Stanford promised a new study, but it never materialized. BYU sunk them, IMO.
Here was the problem with the methodology. If they had chosen you, me, Hawkgrrrl, Bishop Bill, and Dave B as the possible authors of the Book of Mormon, one of us would have come up as the author, even though we clearly weren’t alive when the Book of Mormon was written. The method was going to pick SOMEBODY from the list, whether or not that person actually had something to do with writing the book. The Stanford study was flawed from the get-go. The BYU rebuttal study proved that. It was a slam dunk, and the Stanford guys had egg on their face.
Now, I don’t want to let so-called apologists off the hook. Church employees have produced lots of wordprint studies in favor of Nephi, Moroni, Mormon, Alma, etc as possible authors and voila, those “prove” multiple authors too. Those studies are likely just as flawed. It’s why I don’t trust Wordprint studies. If they really worked, the FBI could have used them to detect Mark Hofmann’s Emily Dickinson forgery. If wordprint studies are ever reliable, they just aren’t at this point.
So, my real point here is to quit casting aspersions on either apologists or critics. Some of their scholarship is good. Some is not. Blanket condemnations of either side are ad hominems and I’m simply not interested in that. I’m interested in promoting the best source of Mormon history, science, and theology, whether it comes from a faithful or faithless source. I talk to everyone and try to do so in as fair manner as possible. (And to be fair, while I have big problems with Jockers conclusions, and I think it could be argued by his critics that he was “working backwards”, I think his motives were honest, but clearly flawed.)
If you want to read a summary of Jockers, see https://mormonheretic.org/2010/02/28/dueling-wordprint-studies/
Here is a summary of the BYU study, and I do think the BYU guys did an outstanding job: https://mormonheretic.org/2011/02/09/debunking-the-jockers-study/
@rick b, I think there’s a difference between a bias and a foregone conclusion or agenda. Sure, everyone’s got a bias. But some apologists – and sure, some critics – have an objective or conclusion they are driving towards. They will twist evidence to fit that conclusion no matter the contortions and they will disregard evidence that doesn’t fit that conclusion. Those are the sorts of apologetics (and, sure, criticisms) that people find obnoxious. And that’s way more than “bias.”
I don’t know Brian Hales well enough to know whether I believe that any evidence *whatsoever* could ever convince him that the BoM is not historical or that JS had sex with his wives. Would be interested to hear his answers to those questions. Any scholar unwilling to change his or her mind when presented with new evidence is more than just “biased.”
Agree that it’s better to focus on arguments that ad hom attacks but I do think you’re being a bit unfair when people bring up this point as there are some fair criticisms of the way LDS apologetics has been misleading that frankly LDS apologetics could probably learn from if it wants to be more effective. I suppose it’s your post so if you want to shut that down, fine, but I don’t think anyone is being crazy here.
There are plenty of people who think Jockers had a forgone conclusion and agenda, And I know they got a lot of the same sorts of calls that their conclusions were misleading.
I also get tired of attacks that Brian Hales claimed Joseph didn’t have sex with his wives. Bryan helped fund the DNA test with Sylvia Sessions Lyon, believing Josephine was offspring of Joseph. Brian frequently gets slammed with distorted arguments he didn’t make.
I’m aware of how bias works, but thank you for the explanation.
Thomas W. Murphy, a member of the church, claimed in 2002 that the Book of Mormon cannot be historical based on DNA evidence, and the church tried to excommunicate him, but backed off when the press showed up. So people whose paycheck and livelihood is attached to Mormonism see this, and what conclusion can they draw other than to support the Church’s truth claims? The problem isn’t the scholars; it’s the system. So yes my view is these scholars must reach a conclusion that support’s the Church’s narrative; your view may be different. And that’s fine. I won’t call you unfashionable or dismiss your choice to believe otherwise like you’ve done to me (references to my argument being a red herring or an ad hominem attack).
You claimed that this happens in reverse: critics start with the premise the church is false and work backward to support this claim. My question was why would a scholar do this? Is it because their funding and social status depend on the church being false? If so, who is funding their research? I am not aware this is a thing. If it is, I’m happy to learn more.
Thank you Elisa for your response.
“I don’t know of ANY apologists or critics who claim that they start with a position that the Church is true/false and work backward. At least nobody admits that.” Rick B., Kerry Muhelstein would disagree: “I start out with an assumption that the Book of Abraham and the Book of Mormon, and anything else that we get from the restored gospel, is true. . . . Therefore, any evidence I find, I will try to fit into that paradigm.” I realize Kerry said the quiet part out loud, but given the state of Mormon apologetics, it’s not hard to believe that most apologists have this same assumption.
The example you gave of Brian Hales and Josephine Sessions is a prime example. I have the 2015 copy of his book Joseph Smith’s Polygamy, in which he says that the marriage to Sylvia Sessions involved sexuality. That is the obvious conclusion, since Sylvia told Josephine (I mean, her name is Josephine) on Sylvia’s deathbed that she was Joseph Smith’s daughter. Hales then goes into a convoluted argument about why this relationship wasn’t polyandrous, because her husband, Windsor Lyon, must have been out of the picture. Now that DNA testing has proven that Josephine was Windor’s daughter, Hales on his website calls the evidence of sexuality between Syliva and Joseph “weak.” Why has Hales suddenly changed his tune about evidentiary quality of the death-bed confession? It’s because he’s starting with the proposition that Joseph Smith could not have engaged in polyandry. That is a bridge to far for him, so he starts with that conclusion and works backwards, fitting the evidence into that framework. He won’t let himself consider the possibility that the evidence shows that Sylvia was having sex with both men at around the same time.
I give Hales a lot more credit than apologists like Muhelstein who obfuscate the facts when presenting their conclusions. Hales has done a lot of work, at his own expense, to bring these facts to light, and he deserves credit for that. But IMHO it seems clear he is starting with the conclusion and working backwards from there.
So…chariots weren’t chariots because wheels weren’t a thing, but ignore the elephant in the room which are horses that also didn’t exist to pull said non-chariots….ok
Chadwick, I feel like you want me to start casting aspersions, as you have done. It’s not my cup of tea. But if you want me to put my bias hat on about so-called funding, John Dehlin, Sandra Tanner, Dan Vogel, all make money off of “the Church is false,” to say nothing of various ministries like Utah Lighthouse ministry, Mormonism Research ministry, etc.
Arguing with strangers in the internet rarely changes anyone’s mind.