Today my daughter told me about the source of errors in the Book of Mormon as she was taught by her seminary teacher.

It turns out that after Oliver Cowdery transcribed the Book of Mormon under Joseph Smith's direction, Oliver took it upon himself to put the transcription into paragraph form. During this process, Oliver introduced numerous errors into the Book of Mormon. Next, Oliver took the Book of Mormon to a publisher who then took the liberty of making editorial changes. In this manner, the publisher inserted numerous additional errors into the Book of Mormon. According to my daughter, this process was repeated by several other publishers who also introduced even more errors into the Book of Mormon.

After Oliver and the publishers caused all these errors to be inserted into the Book of Mormon, much effort by TSCC has gone into correcting the errors and restoring the Book of Mormon to its perfect state as delivered by Joseph's lips. This is the primary reason for the differences between the original published Book of Mormon and the version we have today.

I think the story taught by the seminary teacher is fundamentally wrong, but before I tell my daughter the truth (and thereby incur the wrath of my wife), I want to make sure that I have my facts straight. Given the wealth of knowledge on this board, I'd like to ask for some help. Is there a shred of truth to this story that Oliver and the Book of Mormon publishers were primarily responsible for the errors in the Book of Mormon?

Well, the lord chastens a lot in the D&C, but never about this, why was he silent regarding these errors? And why all the declarations about it being so awesome with no caveats?

When I was in seminary they showed us a movie called
"Windows of Heaven" about how Lorenzo Snow had to go to Saint George and chastise the Latter Day Saintans for not paying their tithing. What a BULL SHI-T story that was.

Southern Utah was having a drought, OF COURSE that was because the resident Latter Day Saintans had not been paying their MORmON tithing. MORmON Profit Lorenzo Snow challenged the MORmON members to pay up on tithing. They did, and finally the rain came. That is supposed to be faith affirming. Too bad it's just pure MORmON spin and MORmON logic.

What the MORmON church via their Seminary teacher indoctUrination agents intentionally failed to tell us was that the Latter Day Saintans had stop paying their tithing because Brigham Young had suspended payment of tithing some years earlier. Brigham Young knew that the only monetary blessings of paying tithing was the tithing money that went to him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OwkFavjPsdE



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2013 09:23PM by lucky.

My seminary teacher taught me about the miraculous rains that occurred after the saints started paying tithing. What he left out was that the rains didn't occur until about half a year after the saints started paying tithing. Doesn't sound so miraculous after all.

the real miracle seems to be how much LDS INC lies to people and manages to get away with it so often.

I only see one problem with that scenario.


What source material is TSCC using to restore the BOM? You see the only source material that they have would be the original manuscript (not even near complete) which was written almost entirely by Oliver Cowdrey. Do the streak marks at the Mormon Administration Building have the Gold Plates and Seer Stone? If not the only thing they have to go off of is Oliver Cowdrey, trashing him is the same as trashing the original manuscript.

there are plenty of people here that can speak to the early church history aspect of this - my beef is with the thought process

this is the 'most correct book' that god wanted brought forth in the latter days specifically because of the translation/transcription errors in the bible, right? then why would god allow any of that to happen? if we believe the story then the god behind the book of mormon is the same god that commanded Nephi to KILL so that this book could come about, right?

my question is why would that god allow such a thing to happen? why did god become such a chode in the latter days? I mean, wouldn't it have been a great lesson for us all that truly, 'no unhallowed hand can stop the work' if Oliver had been struck dumb while working on putting the BoM into paragraph form?

I like your thought process. After going to such lengths to preserve the BoM, why would god let the ball drop right at the end? Doesn't make any sense at all.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2013 09:51PM by procrusteanchurch.

I have never seen an orginal 1st copy of the BOM but I was told it did not contain paragraphs. Paragraphs, headers, verses, chapters, etc have all been added afterwards. I was told the church did this to make it easier to read. I find it interesting the Seminary teacher is teaching the direct opposite from what they used to teach. Liars have to have something to lie about.

Yes, it had paragraphs and chapter numbers, but no verse numbers.

Don't take my word for it. It's here online:

http://www.inephi.com/Search.htm

The BoM reflects very well the mindset of people in that place and time. I don't mean the times in ancient America, I mean early 19th century thought. It turned out that some of these ideas became discordant and embarrassing pretty quick. Changes were accordingly made. They have changed it about as much as they can now without actually admitting that they are making up new stuff. The book has actually reached a point where it is difficult to find new people who will take it seriously due to it's obvious fictional character. The crass racism, anachronisms and dependence upon obviously false bible stories like Adam and Eve, the Tower of Babel and Noah's Flood relegate it to nothing more than 19th century Christian fan fiction, unless one is really, really gullible... or stupid.

No, your daughter is not being taught the truth in seminary. She's being indoctrinated with fairy tales while she's still young and naive.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2013 09:45PM by rationalist01.

The Book of Mormon is fiction.
Joseph Smith made it all up and the people in the book never existed in reality.

How do we know this?

Because DNA shows that the ancestors of all native Americans came from Asia.

No Jewish/Hebrew/Semite DNA in the mix until after Columbus arrived.

Your daughter is wasting her time in Seminary and in the Mormon church.

Without the golden plates, or at least an accurate facsimile of the text on the golden plates... How can any intelligent discussion about the BoM take place? The seminary teacher's story is just guess work. My story is, the BoM is total fiction. Never happened.

If there was an actual lexicon for the BoM, a book showing side-by-side comparisons of the original Reformed Egyptian text with the English translation, then we could have an intelligent discussion about it. Without it, its laughable. Discussing Klingon art/history at a Trekkie convention makes more sense.

Short answer: No.

Have you looked at Mormonthink? It is a great resource with a lot of information about this.

Also, the joseph smith papers website has scanned images of every page of the 1830 edition of the Book of Mormon. The 1837, 1840, 1841 editions are also there under The Papers-Revelations and Translations-Book of Mormon editions.

There is no transcribing that went on. There is no ancient text to set anything right. No ancient text at all. Their claim is useless if they can't produce a page of the original holy manuscript or a gold plate. The head in the hat. There is your original translation.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2013 10:48PM by snuckafoodberry.

It doesn't matter who wrote it. It isn't even close to what the mormon church claims it is.

There's so much wrong with the BoM story that it has taken historians years and a library of books to tell what really happened, and what the BoM really is.

You might as well send your child to the Harry potter school. What she's learning would be about as relevant.

Brings to my mind Salamman Rushdie and the "Satanic Verses," which was a novel about how the scribe of the illiterate Mohammed made his own editorial improvements on the Koran. Of course, Rushdie got a death fatwah for his artistic efforts.

The sacred texts of my new religion are in Highland Esperanto, engraved on Neptunium plates, straight from the oracles of Xenu. Touch them and you die!

Translation, and I use the word loosely, of the BoM was suspended when Martin Harris lost the 116 pages for fear the translation would be tampered with which would prove JS to be a fraud. So Oliver's error and publication errors of the book that tampered with the original translation was OK? No, the story the seminary makes no sense.

I think this is actually pretty smart of TSCC. They tell the kids that there is are differences between the BOM now and he first BOM and then they provide a perfectly bland and reasonable explanation for it. Then, if they ever discover the differences for themselves it isnt a holy shiz moment. I wasnt taught this is seminary (Im 31) and when i read about the differences, it was super surprising and upsetting. They are giving them just enough of the truth to keep them on the hook.
bastards.

"We believe the Book of Mormon to be the Word of God."

When was the above written? The Articles of Faith were written by church prophets, before all the changes.

If Joseph Smith was dead, how would anyone know the "real" translation, if not from documents that Joseph Smith left behind. Oh, that would be the Book of Mormon. We go around in circles, here. Maybe Monson needs to have Joseph Smith visit him directly, in a vision, to clear all this up. Better yet, why doesn't Mormon (or is it Moroni) re-appear and start over. Mormonism is a mess that makes no sense....and where does a let's-go-shopping mall fit into all this? Lies upon lies upon lies upon lies.

God is omnipotent and create the world.

But he can't create a book. Start with that. Why can't God create a book?

Why this tortuously complicated process of having one person write it on plates, hide it for hundreds of years. Then Horn dog Joe ignores the U and T and the plates during the translation (and by translation we mean revelation) through a rock in a hat.

And even if God transcribed it word by word through a rock in a hat he neglected to give them punctuation and paragraph breaks.

Oh let me guess "he wants to try our faith".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/29/2013 11:12PM by crom.

My son had release time seminary here in Utah last year. Everyday he would play "stump the chump" in class by asking the teacher questions to which he already knew the answer because he looked it up himself the night before.

She flat out lied to him most of the time and the rest of the class. Then, she had the nerve to pull him aside tell him to be quiet and stop asking questions.

She did far more to push him out of TSCC than I could ever have hoped for or have done myself. He dropped seminary half-way through the year. He never taking it again.

Nice!

Still nice.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/30/2013 10:47AM by crom.

The printer was doing a favor for the BoM author(s), who failed almost entirely to punctuate the manuscript that was given to the printer. The Mormon church finally admitted that.

From BYU.edu:

"As far as we can determine, the original text of the Book of Mormon had no punctuation. The original manuscript had some dashes in the summaries that are typically found at the beginning of books or sections of books, but elsewhere in the original manuscript the scribes provided no punctuation. For the printer's manuscript, Oliver Cowdery and scribe 2 added some punctuation as they copied the original manuscript. The 1830 typesetter, John Gilbert, ignored the scribes' suggested punctuation and provided his own as he set the type. In most instances, Gilbert's punctuation (or its equivalent) has been retained in the text."

http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publications/books/?bookid=104&chapid=1169


From lds.org:

"'After working a few days, I [the BoM printer] said to [Hyrum] on his handing me the manuscript in the morning; "Mr. Smith, if you would leave this manuscript with me, I would take it home with me at night and read and punctuate it." His reply was, "We are commanded not to leave it." A few mornings after this, when [Hyrum] handed me the manuscript, he said to me: "if you will give your word that this manuscript shall be returned to us when you get through with it, I will leave it with you." … for two or three nights I took it home with me and read it, and punctuated it with a lead pencil.' (In Wilford C. Wood, Joseph Smith Begins His Work, vol. 1, Salt Lake City: Wilford C. Wood, 1959.)

"His effort resulted in somewhere between 30,000–35,000 additional punctuation marks."

https://www.lds.org/ensign/1983/12/understanding-textual-changes-in-the-book-of-mormon?lang=eng


Beyond these punctuational edits, the printer introduced very few substantive changes.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 08/30/2013 04:30AM by Fetal Deity.

Thanks for the references, those will be good to share with my daughter.

So "Another Testament of Jesus Christ" was edited by a gentile typesetter!

They have corrected more than just punctuation though. Words have been added, removed and changed.

There will be a list somewhere online, but examples are where Moroni called King Mosiah "King Benjamin", and where they added "son of" to all the places they called Jesus "God". They had to remove some dated phrases that were too odd, like changing "because that" into because and similar; then they had to remove american hick language changing a-going to "going" and a-walking to "walking" (or similar, I can't remember the exact examples).

This story sounds like a retrofit attempt to acknowledge that the BM has flaws, but deflect the blame from JS.

In a way, this tale makes JS look worse. It's one thing to make mistakes; it's another to be so hands off that you let other people's incompetence screw up your own project.

I've never heard this story before, so I'm calling nonsense on it.

What a load of bunk. In the biggining of all this god is going to strike dead ANYONE that even gazes on the plates or "remove out of their place" any person or prophet that messes with his restored message. Then all of a sudden its a free for all willy nilly where ol' Oliver can insert personal opinion that is inacurate and could possibly lead us all astray with doubt? And god stands by and displays a nature of inconsistancy and contradiction personally? What a crock and an obvious act of desperation.

The Tanners published a book titled "3913 Changes in the Book of Mormon." It discusses each change ranging from typographical corrects to doctrinal "updates." It pretty much documents how your daughter's seminary teacher is spreading BS.

Joseph Smith taught that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book.

How can it be the most correct book with all these flaws? And if it has all these incorrectly transcribed portions, how can you pray and receive a testimony that it is true?

I think they want to give the impression that the BOM has small and negligible problems, and keep them focused on inconsequential issues. The big issue is that God did not reserve the new world for Lehi and his descendants. People inhabited the whole of the Western Hemisphere 15,000+ years before that. No legitimate archeologist thinks any of it happened.