Appearance
Book of Mormon
The CES Letter opens its entire case against the Church with the Book of Mormon. That's not an accident.
It leads with two epigraph quotes — President Benson calling the Book of Mormon "the keystone of our testimony" and Elder Holland calling it "a sudden death proposition."[1] The framing is deliberate: attack the keystone first, and the reader approaches every subsequent topic — Book of Abraham, polygamy, temples — assuming the foundation has already cracked. Every later section borrows its weight from this one.
The CES Letter is right about one thing. The Book of Mormon is the decisive question. If it's what Joseph Smith said it is, then every secondary concern in the CES Letter must be weighed against a keystone that held. If the Book of Mormon survives the CES Letter's best efforts — and it does — the rest of the letter is fighting uphill.
So does the Book of Mormon survive scrutiny, or doesn't it?
Eleven claims, twenty pages, no depth
The CES Letter's Book of Mormon section runs eleven numbered arguments across twenty pages.[2] Not one receives sustained analysis. The anachronism claim lists thirteen items in a single sentence — horses, cattle, steel, elephants, wheat — with no individual discussion of any of them.[3] The DNA claim cites no genetic studies and no geneticists.[4] The archaeology claim declares "absolutely no archaeological evidence" without engaging a single piece of evidence.[5]
The strategy is accumulation. Stack enough concerns fast enough that even if a reader dismisses several, the sheer volume feels overwhelming. It works — until you slow down and check each claim individually.
Three plagiarism theories that cancel each other out
The CES Letter presents View of the Hebrews, The Late War, and The First Book of Napoleon back-to-back as though they collectively strengthen the case against the Book of Mormon.[6] They don't. They're contradictory theories. Joseph Smith could not have plagiarized all three simultaneously.
View of the Hebrews disagrees with the Book of Mormon on the departure city, the route, the migrating group, and the lawgiver — John Welch catalogued 84 specific differences. The Late War shares 0.23% of its text with the Book of Mormon, and the two books are syntactically anti-correlated. The First Book of Napoleon "comparison" is twelve common words pulled from 25 scattered pages, stitched together with ellipses.
The CES Letter never commits to one theory because none work alone. Presenting all three is a tell: when you need three mutually exclusive explanations, you don't have one.
Tripling the count by splitting one question into three
Claims 1 through 3 — KJV errors, KJV italics, and KJV mistranslations — are variations of a single question: what is the relationship between the Book of Mormon and the King James Bible?[7] The CES Letter presents them as three independent problems. That triples the apparent number of issues before the section is three pages old.
When you examine the actual evidence, the KJV relationship cuts against the CES Letter's thesis. Italicized KJV words are omitted at 40 times the rate of non-italicized words — the opposite of what copying produces. Several Book of Mormon readings match Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts discovered 117 years later. And the grammar of the Book of Mormon is demonstrably older than the King James Bible.
The evidence the CES Letter never mentions
The CES Letter treats the Book of Mormon as a problem to be explained away. The evidence tells a different story.
The dictation. The Book of Mormon — 268,000+ words — was dictated in approximately 60 working days. Multiple scribes described Joseph dictating with his face in a hat containing a seer stone, no books or manuscripts present. Emma Smith: "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from."[8] Oliver Cowdery purchased a Bible on October 8, 1829 — months after the translation was completed.[9] No outline. No notes. No substantive revisions to earlier sections as later ones were dictated. 337 proper names, three calendar systems, and over 550 internally consistent geographic references across 531 pages — dictated orally, with no maps.[10]
A man who didn't know Jerusalem had walls produced a text whose internal geography is virtually flawless.
Dead Sea Scroll confirmations. Discovered in 1947 — 117 years after the Book of Mormon was published. Multiple Book of Mormon Isaiah readings that diverge from the KJV were confirmed by these manuscripts. Tvedtnes scored 234 Isaiah variants: 59 favor the Book of Mormon, 126 are neutral, 49 favor the KJV.[11] A plagiarist working from a KJV Bible should produce zero readings confirmed by manuscripts buried in caves until 1947. The margin is modest. The direction is impossible under a plagiarism model.
At 3 Nephi 12:22, the Book of Mormon omits "without a cause" from the Sermon on the Mount. The earliest Greek manuscripts and early church fathers all lack the phrase. The critical analysis confirming the omission wasn't published until 1956 — 126 years after the Book of Mormon.[12]
Pre-KJV English. Stanford Carmack identified grammatical structures in the Book of Mormon that predate the King James Bible and were extinct by 1829. Periphrastic did at 24% (KJV: 1.2%). Personal which at 52% (KJV: 12.6%). Over 90 archaic vocabulary items with meanings from the 1530s-1730s that do not appear in the KJV — ruling out the King James Bible as their source.[13]
Joseph Smith's own 1832 History uses none of these patterns. Pseudo-biblical authors of his era are syntactically anti-correlated with the Book of Mormon. If Joseph copied the KJV, where did the pre-KJV English come from? If he invented the text, why does his own writing look nothing like it?
Nahom and the Arabian trail. Three votive altars bearing the tribal name NHM, discovered at the Bar'an temple near Marib, Yemen, date to the 7th-8th century BC — Lehi's lifetime. The Nihm tribal region sits exactly where the Book of Mormon's travel narrative requires: on the ancient incense trail, at the point where the route turns eastward toward the coast. No map available to Joseph Smith showed any of this. Terryl Givens called these "the first actual archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon."[14] The Valley of Lemuel, Bountiful at Khor Kharfot, and four additional sites along Lehi's trail have since been confirmed.
The anachronism vindication trend. Of 226 anachronism claims tracked across 1,000+ critical publications since 1830, 91.2% were unconfirmed in 1844. By 2024, only 9.3% remain unconfirmed.[15] Cement, barley, steel swords, large-scale fortifications, populations in the millions — all once called impossible, all now confirmed. The trend is one-directional across 180 years. Not one confirmed item has moved back to unconfirmed.
The CES Letter says "absolutely no archaeological evidence."[5:1] LiDAR surveys in 2018 revealed 60,000 previously unknown structures in Guatemala's Mirador Basin, revising Maya lowland population estimates to 10-15 million. Only about 1.4% of the Maya world has been surveyed. If entire cities with highways and fortifications remained invisible until 2018, the argument that "we should have found Nephite evidence by now" collapses.
No naturalistic theory works. No proposed explanation simultaneously accounts for the 60-day dictation with no notes, 550+ internally consistent geographic references, pre-KJV English grammar, Hebraisms invisible to English readers, Dead Sea Scroll confirmations, the Arabian trail, the anachronism vindication trend, the 40:1 italic-word omission ratio, and a manuscript whose errors come from hearing, not reading. The CES Letter offers three source theories and commits to none — because none work.
Bottom line: The CES Letter chose "sudden death" framing. So did we. The Book of Mormon was dictated in 60 days with no notes, contains readings confirmed by manuscripts buried until 1947, uses grammar older than the KJV, and matches Arabian geography no 1829 map could show. After 190 years of scrutiny, the evidence has only moved in one direction. The keystone held.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," p. 8. The epigraphs quote President Ezra Taft Benson, "The Book of Mormon — Keystone of Our Religion," and Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, "True or False," New Era, June 1995. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," pp. 8-27. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 5, p. 11. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 4, p. 11. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 6, pp. 11-13. ↩︎ ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," nos. 8-10, pp. 16-25. ↩︎
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," nos. 1-3, pp. 8-11. ↩︎
Emma Smith, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289-290. ↩︎
Oliver Cowdery's Bible was purchased from Palmyra bookseller E.B. Grandin on October 8, 1829. The translation was completed by late June 1829. See Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 27. ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). Hardy observed that "one would assume the author worked from charts and maps." ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, "The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report (1981). https://scripturecentral.org/archive/presentations/report/isaiah-variants-book-mormon ↩︎
Bruce M. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (Stuttgart: United Bible Societies, 1971). The earliest manuscripts (P67, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus) and early church fathers (Justin Martyr, Tertullian, Origen) all lack "without a cause." ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter 25 (2017). https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history. See also Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter 28 (2018): 177-232. ↩︎
Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter (2025). Of 226 tracked claims: 91.2% unconfirmed in 1844, 9.3% unconfirmed by 2024. See also John Clark, "Archaeology, Relics, and Book of Mormon Belief," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 14, no. 2 (2005). ↩︎