The ex-Mormon Conference was great!

- In addition the Napoleon book mentioned in other threads,

The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth (1809):
http://archive.org/details/firstbooknapole00gruagoog


The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain is a major source for the Book of Mormon text.
http://archive.org/details/latewarbetween_00hunt

It was printed in New York when JS was age 11, and it was used as a school book. It is written in the King James style. Thanks to Chris and Dwayne from Candida for discovering this great new information, which will surely be dissected and digested more in the coming months.

Thanks to Kathleen, Sue, Richard and the others who put together a great conference.

This is a great double find.

However, be aware that "chronicles" written in KJV
style English were popular in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries.

Somebody really should compile a master list of these
strange histories and pseudo-histories, so that we
can ascertain which of them are most like certain
parts of the Book of Mormon, and which of them really
have little in common with the Mormon book.

UD

http://askreality.com/hidden-in-plain-sight/#more-56

Here is Chris and Duane's (sorry about the misspelling above) website. It has a list of books that ranked high in their analysis. There are indeed other books written in that same style that appear on their list.

Further down the page are 4-word matches with the BofM, and if it doesn't show anything else, it is certainly strong evidence that the BofM is a product of JS's time and place.

Hey Uncle Dale,

Apparently Chris has done the new textual analysis on the extant Spalding manuscript as well, and it and View of the Hebrews make up the other two of the four sources they identify for the BoM.

The method of comparing 3 and 4 word strings looks similar to your original work, only they have crunched the numbers on thousands of texts from the period so "average" data of the expected number of hits between unrelated texts. As far as I can tell from what has been released so far, this is yet more confirmation of your original work, in addition to identifying the two new possible new sources.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2013 08:16PM by Susan I/S.

Good to see that this sort of work is being done.

Of course the Book of Mormon, as a whole, cannot
productively be directly compared with other pre-1830
texts in English. First of all the obvious borrowings
from the KJV Bible need to be stripped out, and the
remaining text should be de-constructed, so as to
identify sections that do not compare well one with
another (the possible products of different or multiple
authorship).

None of that work would necessarily remove all of the
Book of Mormon's Elizabethan language (in fact, for
some comparisons, we would want to retain it as much
as is practical), but it would result in a somewhat
different 1830 edition base text for further analysis.

Two possible writing methods should be looked for --
and probably tested independently -- (1) a method in
which KJV language and snippets of KJV passages were
used in the original composition of the Book of Mormon;
and (2) a method in which source texts not composed
in KJV style English were incorporated into the Book
of Mormon, but were later "dressed up" in KJV lingo.

My guess is that the latter method makes the most
sense, as it would allow for hundreds of times as many
possible incorporations of existing writings, than would
a composition method that only relied upon "Chronicles"
set down in the biblical style.

While we are at it, we might also look for patterns of
faulty emulation of KJV language -- the sorts of spelling
and grammatical mistakes that an amateur copyist might
easily make -- versus the KJV emulation that a scholar
well versed in Hebrew, Greek, and 16th century English
would generally come up with.

If there were multiple Book of Mormon authors -- and, if
the book's base text was "dressed up" in KJV emulations
created on-the-fly, then we might even be able to detect
the compositional mistakes identifying the word-prints
of two, three, or even four contributors of the Mormon
book, working together in a pre-1830 conspiracy.

Historical and text-critical analysis of the Hebrew Bible
has already generated hundreds of studies devoted to
deconstruction of complex texts, composed by more than
one author, and melded together by an editor who tried
to give the resulting narrative a uniform literary look.
We might learn something useful by consulting some of
these critical analysis of the biblical text reports.

I only wish I had a million dollars to contribute to a
handful of starving graduate students currently interested
in pursuing such research.

UD

In another post, the brother of the author is saying that Manuscript Found is only "weakly connected", and not as good as a "source" as Late Wars or Napolean.

But of course they didn't test Manuscript Found - but Manuscript Story, which is not in Jacobean English and is not claimed as a source. So the similarities they found are still very interesting. It would be interesting to separate out the different parts of the Book of Mormon by the authors proposed by the Mormonleaks team.

The fact that there are many of these types of writings from that time is very interesting to me, I had no idea. Throw the Book of Mormon in a sea of these and I'm betting it wouldn't even stand out from the bunch. In fact I posted earlier about how you could probably trick a TBM into believing that the book of napoleon was new scripture.

You know what the apologists will say, dontcha?

"The anti's pick and choose from a wide variety of disparate sources, and throw all kinds of things against the wall in the vain hope that a few will stick and make a few tenuous connections."

Not that Nibley, et al, ever did the same thing, naahhh....

To OP

Sorry to ask this if already addressed...

Did you intend to find out about the texts that influenced the BoM or did you stumble on the BoM as a result of running all 1800s texts in an algorithm?

As a guess, I suspect there's not many books out there that claim to be written by people other than original authors. So my guess is you used your big data sample to deconstruct the BoM's bogus origins.

That was so fascinating! I love when science can filter out perception and bias.

I think the high fives over on the other board are a little pre-mature. This discovery is just another piece of evidence to throw on the mountain of evidence against the Book of Mormon. If apologists are comfortable defending all the other obvious problems with the book of mormon, and they have no problem defending the obvious fraud of the Book of Abraham, and the church actually teaches the lost 116 page fiasco as a faith promoting story, then it will take a LOT more than the discovery of a couple books that sound like the Book of Mormon to cause the apologists any concern. TBMs will cover their eyes and plug their ears while the apologists yawn and wave their hands dismissively.

I don't know about you guys, but these sound more like than the BoM than anything else I've read, especially the War Between the US & Britain book. The structure, the wording, the phrases, the storylines, etc. I wish I had more time to read it to do some real word for word comparisons.

I am extremely impressed.

I resigned my membership in TSCC 7 years ago, and have long dismissed the BOM as fabrication. But, I have been frustrated at not being able to locate a "smoking gun" source for Joseph's imagination.

Well, of all the things I have read, I've never seen anything so convincing as these 2 documents. The similarities in style and wording are, in a word, astounding.

Like another poster mentioned, even if Joseph did not use these books as resources, they unquestionably demonstrate that the BOM is a product of early 19-century literature.

Bravo to the folks who brought these documents to our attention.

Some people are viewing the work of Chris Johnson as evidence against a Spalding contribution to the Book of Mormon.

I don't see why.

At the MormonLeaks site, we discuss widespread use of Early Modern English (King James English) and the phrase "it came to pass" on Slide 23 in Episode 2.

http://mormonleaks.com/library/episode-02/

Slide 23 reads:

"Writing in the Old Style was a popular fad in America at the time Spalding wrote Manuscript Found"

We also say,

"from the mid-1740's through 1830, some American authors adopted a Pseudo-Biblical style of writing. Robert Dodsley (1744) wrote the first such text, beginning with the lines: "Now it came to pass in the year One thousand sixty and six...William of Normandy...landed in England."

So it does not surprise me that we have other texts with such wording from that time period.

In addition, I should point out that Smith and the Smith family were not the only people who could have had contact with texts written in the "old style". Rigdon, Pratt and Cowdery could also have had contact. And any Spalding text was likely edited by Rigdon and Pratt. In our attributions, Pratt is the second most likely author for many of the texts that we attributed to Spalding.

One final point...our text analyses at MormonLeaks are based on frequently used words, not phrases. This is an important distinction in methodology. Plagiarism of phrases is common, but phrase plagiarism is unlikely to change the authorship attribution unless it is extensive. This is because it is difficult for an author to consciously change his/her usage of frequently used words, like "the", "to", "of", "which", and so on.

Craig C Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Some people are viewing the work of Chris Johnson
> as evidence against a Spalding contribution to the
> Book of Mormon.
>
> I don't see why...

Well, the "Late War" book was published too late to
have ever been consulted by Solomon Spalding -- so,
if it is a near perfect match with the Book of Mormon,
then some folks might agree that fact alone removes
Spalding from the possible authors list.

The "First Book of Napoleon" text would have been
available to Spalding, but there seems to be no evidence
that its content or wording influenced the one extant
Spalding novel .Thus, to the reasoning
of some readers, Spalding is once again removed from
the authorship list.

This is rather like my concluding that the 5:00 crowing
rooster is the origin of the 5:30 sunrise, I'd say,
But, I've found that both Mormons and many ex-Mormons
are prone to readily accept simple, black or white,
propositions and equally simple answers to questions.

Suppose, however, that Alvin Smith did write the
Book of Mormon, consulting these two pre-1830 volumes,
and that, on his deathbed, Alvin handed over his
manuscript to Hyrum, for hopeful publication. Perhaps
all was going smoothly until Hyrum's younger brother
lost track of the first 116 pages....

A plausible story. But I'll predict that skeptics in
Mormon historical investigations will quickly reject
most of that conclusion? And why? Because we are all
intensely pre-conditioned to view "Brother Joseph" as
the greatest human being ever to walk the earth --
or, as W.W. Phelps hinted at in his 1844 funeral sermon,
probably Joseph Smith created this world in a pre-existence.

There is no room left in our minds for input from Lucy,
Alvin, Hyrum, Oliver, and other family members. Joseph
MUST have written the book, and his source material MUST
resemble the Nephite Record very, very closely.

We seem incapable of taking an additional 30 seconds of
thinking time, to consider alternative possibilities.

UD



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/22/2013 08:18PM by Susan I/S.

As much as I'm impressed with what Joe was able to pull off, and how much tang he got, I'm even more impressed with the fruits of this kind of text analysis.

The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain is a major source for the Book of Mormon text.
http://archive.org/details/latewarbetween_00hunt

The only thing I see similar to the book of Mormon in there is the phrase "it came to pass". If there were some full sentences or verses that were the same but different from the Bible that would be impressive.

Actually, I think the new finding points to sources for the wording and the wars. The basic outline of the BoM I think came from the Spaulding papers. Also, JS took certain parts of the BoM from different sources, such as Judith used in First Nephi both in ideas and in some exact phrases.