Cover image: Printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon.

An event to celebrate the completion of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project will be held on Saturday, August 10 in the Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Building on the campus of Brigham Young University.  An informal open house will begin at 12 noon, and the program will run from 1 PM to 3 PM.

For the past thirty-six years, Royal Skousen, now a retired Brigham Young University professor of English language and linguistics, has devoted his acute and precise scholarly intelligence to the textual history of the Book of Mormon.  His effort has gone under the title of “The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project.”

But why, one might ask, is such a project even necessary?  Understandably, many readers of the Book of Mormon simply assume that its modern printed English editions contain the same text that Joseph Smith originally dictated to his scribes in 1828–1829.  And, for most if not all practical purposes, these common printed versions are certainly close enough.  But, in fact, even the first edition of the Book of Mormon (published in 1830) ended up with a considerable number of changes, including many that had entered the text during its dictation. Most of the early changes were made when the scribes—reluctant to entrust the sole existing manuscript of the translation to the hired printer, E. B. Grandin—transcribed the printer’s manuscript from the original manuscript.  But there were also many changes that the 1830 typesetter, John Gilbert, introduced into the text. And subsequent editions have continued to make changes in the text, including numerous grammatical emendations.  These have attempted to eliminate the nonstandard English that occurred in the original text of the Book of Mormon as dictated by the Prophet. While none of these changes has affected the doctrine of the book or its basic story line, they have resulted in a very complex textual history.

In October 1841, Joseph placed the original dictation manuscript of the Book of Mormon in the southeast cornerstone of the Nauvoo House, a place that had been appointed by revelation for lodging visitors. (See Doctrine and Covenants 124:84-96.)  More than four decades later, that original manuscript was recovered but—because water had seeped into the building’s stonework (Nauvoo sits, after all, on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River, the “Father of Waters”)—only somewhat less than thirty percent of it remained undecayed and without significant mold.  The printer’s manuscript, by contrast, was reverently guarded by members of the Whitmer family for many decades before coming into the possession of what was then called the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.  Thereafter, until it was acquired in 2017 by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City, it rested in a bank vault in Jackson County, Missouri.

Prior to Royal Skousen’s project there had never been any published edition of either the original manuscript or the printer’s manuscript.  So his original goal was simply to create detailed transcriptions of those two manuscripts of the Book of Mormon and then to publish them.   But the Critical Text Project soon became much bigger than merely publishing transcripts and photographs. One important finding has been that the manuscripts themselves show that the text had undergone numerous changes right from the very beginning of the transmission process. Just three months into the work, by August of 1988, Skousen had discovered sixteen different readings—different, that is, than in the published editions—within the first 43 surviving pages of the original manuscript.

It is vitally important to properly understand what the term “critical text” means, to understand that a “critical text” is not a writing that is “critical” of a writer or of another book.  In the sense relevant to Royal Skousen’s project, a “critical text” is primarily intended to provide the original text for a work—to the extent, anyway, that such an original text can be determined by scholarly means.  The ultimate goal of Skousen’s project has been to restore the original English-language text of the Book of Mormon, and to provide a history of the changes that the text has undergone.

On the afternoon of Saturday, 10 August 2024, a celebration of the completion of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project will be held on the campus of Brigham Young University under the sponsorship of BYU Studies and the Interpreter Foundation.  The event, which will be free and open to the public, will begin at twelve noon with an informal open house in BYU’s Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Building.  The open house will permit attendees to interact with Royal Skousen and his sometime collaborator, Stanford Carmack, and to examine the books that have resulted from the project.  Two formal presentations will then follow between 1:00 PM and 3:00 PM:  Royal Skousen will speak on “The Innovative and Revolutionary Book of Mormon Critical Text Project,” summarizing many of the important insights that have emerged from his nearly four decades of careful scholarship.  Thereupon, Dr. Carmack—trained in both linguistics and law at Stanford University and holding a doctorate in historical syntax from the University of California at Santa Barbara—will address some of the most surprising and unexpected findings to emerge from the project: “The Archaic Language of the Original Book of Mormon Text.”  All are welcome.

In many respects, the single most important product of Royal Skousen’s labors has been “The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text,” originally published in 2009 by Yale University Press as a single volume and since 2022 available in a revised and improved paperback edition.  As Stephen Prothero, of Boston University, characterized the first edition in the “Wall Street Journal,” “this Yale edition aims to take us back to the text (Joseph) Smith envisioned as he translated, according to the faithful, from golden plates that he unearthed in upstate New York.”

But the Yale edition is backed up by a vast amount of work that is documented in multiple massive and beautifully produced volumes containing the results of Skousen’s and Carmack’s research, their reasoning for their conclusions, and penetrating commentary on the significance of what they have found.

Already several years ago the Latter-day Saint historian Grant Hardy, of the University of North Carolina at Asheville, declared that Royal Skousen’s efforts “will forever change the way Latter-day Saints approach modern scripture. Two hundred years from now . . . students of the Book of Mormon will still be poring over Skousen’s work. What he has accomplished is nothing short of phenomenal.”

Time and space will permit me to discuss only a few of the results of Royal Skousen’s labors here, merely some aspects of his work that have particularly caught my interest.  I can’t get into the remarkable consistency that he has found in the Book of Mormon, or into the ways in which the manuscripts themselves corroborate—or, in one interesting case—contradict the testimony of witnesses to the translation process.

The original manuscript of the Book of Mormon and, to a significant degree, its first published edition, contained a great deal of “nonstandard” English grammar, which provoked mocking laughter among some critics.  That nonstandard grammar has largely been removed from standard editions of the Book of Mormon—some of it by Joseph Smith himself for the 1837 printing—but it has been restored in Skousen’s Yale edition.  Skousen and Carmack contend that the “bad grammar” of the original text would have been acceptable language usage in the English of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (known as Early Modern English), and that it can even be found in scholarly writing published in the 1500s and 1600s.  Examples can be identified in Early Modern English for virtually each case of the Book of Mormon’s “nonstandard” language.

In the late 1990s, Renee Bangerter, who was serving as a research assistant to Royal Skousen at the time, discovered that a number of the words used in the Book of Mormon had meanings that dated from the 1500s and 1600s (and even earlier)—meanings that had disappeared from English long before the early 1800s, when Joseph Smith translated the book.  Since then, Skousen and Carmack have extended Bangerter’s research.  They have found that, with only a few exceptions, the meanings of the Book of Mormon words agree with how they were used in English from the 1530s up through the 1730s and that, in fact, a large number of these words had lost those meanings at least a century or more before the Book of Mormon was translated in 1828–1829.

Some have found it difficult to accept the presence of Early Modern English in the original text of the Book of Mormon—especially those who assume that Joseph Smith was the author of the text. A few have proposed that Joseph’s upstate New York English was a relic dialect and that the resulting archaic Book of Mormon usage reflects older language forms that had died out elsewhere in the English-speaking world but not in Palmyra, New York. Yet, thus far, they have been unable to find any evidence for such forms in dialect studies from that part of the United States (or anywhere else), nor have they found these forms in Joseph Smith’s own writing or in that of his contemporaries. Still, although the finding is strange and was certainly not expected, the evidence is overwhelming that these indicators of non-biblical Early Modern English are, indeed, present in the Book of Mormon.  Skousen and Carmack don’t try to explain that fact; they simply try to accurately identify and describe it.

An additional striking linguistic fact that has emerged from the Critical Text Project is this: Some of the curious English of the original Book of Mormon text seems to reflect an underlying Hebrew or Semitic original.

Another interesting finding of the Critical Text Project needs just a bit of explanation for non-specialists:  Historically, textual critics (of the Bible, for example) have assumed that those who copy manuscripts behave rather the same way that editors do, smoothing out difficult readings and adding words (where they think it necessary) so that the text will make better sense. However, although there is evidence in the later textual history of the Book of Mormon that editors did precisely what the textual critics have claimed, this is not what occurred in the early history of the Book of Mormon’s transmission.  In the specific case of the Book of Mormon, Royal Skousen has found, copyists—very unlike editors—have accidentally tended to change the text to more difficult readings rather than to easier readings, and to shorter readings more frequently than to longer readings. These results go completely against what textual critics have been claiming for the past several hundred years.  Skousen’s findings directly challenge some of the bedrock assumptions of biblical textual criticism, as well as of literary textual criticism more generally.

The Book of Mormon Critical Text Project is a landmark of Latter-day Saint scholarship and arguably, the most impressive critical text project ever done.  We cannot be in the room with them as Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon text to, say, Oliver Cowdery or Martin Harris.  We are separated from the translation by very nearly two full centuries.  However, seeing the process, and the revealed text, through the lens of the work done by Royal Skousen and Stanford Carmack may afford us the closest feasible alternative.

In one of his own summary statements on his project, Skousen writes that,

“We now know much more about the original text of the Book of Mormon, especially its occasional Hebrew-like syntax, the archaic language dating from Early Modern English, and its systematic phraseology. And we now have a much clearer insight into how Joseph Smith translated (however one interprets the word “translate”), with strong evidence that he dictated the text word for word and that he controlled for the spelling of the strange Book of Mormon names. In my mind, the original text as given to Joseph Smith is “a marvelous work and a wonder” and not to be treated lightly. My ultimate goal has been to pay this text the respect it deserves.”

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An event to celebrate the completion of the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project will be held on Saturday, August 10 in the Gordon B. Hinckley Alumni Building on the campus of Brigham Young University.  An informal open house will begin at 12 noon, and the program will run from 1 PM to 3 PM.

Royal Skousen’s articles for “Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship” can be found at https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/author/royals/?journal.  Stanford Carmack’s can be found at https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/author/stanfordc/?journal.