Book of Mormon
The Book of Mormon is the scripture Joseph Smith published in 1830. He said he translated it by the gift and power of God from an ancient record, engraved on gold plates and buried in a hillside for some 1,400 years. The CES Letter's whole case rests on the opposite claim: that there were no plates and no ancient record, and that Joseph simply wrote the book himself.
The letter opens its longest section by calling two apostles to the stand.[1] It quotes Ezra Taft Benson on the Book of Mormon as the keystone of the faith:
"the Book of Mormon is the keystone of [our] testimony. Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, so does all the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon."
And it quotes Jeffrey R. Holland, who called the book a "sudden death" proposition:
"Either the Book of Mormon is what the Prophet Joseph said it is or this Church and its founder are false, fraudulent, a deception from the first instance onward."
The letter takes both men at their word and aims here first. The thinking is simple. Shake a reader's confidence in the Book of Mormon, and every later section, the Book of Abraham, polygamy, the temple, falls on someone who already suspects the foundation gave way.
On that much the CES Letter is right. The Book of Mormon really is the question that decides the rest. It is also the section where the CES Letter is weakest. Strip off the variety and every argument here reduces to one charge worn a dozen ways: that Joseph, a barely schooled farm boy in 1829 New York, sat down and wrote the book out of his own head. DNA, anachronisms, archaeology, the King James wording, the rival books are each just one more attempt to supply the missing how that charge requires.
That points to one fair test for every claim in the section. Suppose all its facts are true. Does it then give Joseph a workable way to produce this book himself, with no gold plates and no ancient record behind him? Most of the arguments never reach that question.
They work at reading speed instead: a statistic with no source attached, thirteen "impossible" items packed into one sentence, two columns set side by side so your eye supplies a verdict the words never state. Slow any one of them down and a surprising share reverse on you.
"He copied his Bible"
Open the Book of Mormon and you will find long stretches that track the Bible almost word for word, especially chapters of Isaiah and a version of the Sermon on the Mount, all in the same King James English a reader in 1829 already knew. The first three arguments seize on that overlap. They are really one question asked three times: did Joseph just copy those passages out of his own family Bible?
The simplest version says the book repeats printing errors found only in the 1769 edition of the King James Bible, the one Joseph owned. It does not hold, because those same readings sit in the original 1611 printing too, so the 1769-errors claim breaks on its own premise.
The second points to the italics. When the King James translators added an English word that was not in the original Hebrew or Greek, to smooth out a sentence, they set it in a different typeface. Someone copying by eye would have no reason to treat those words differently from any others. Yet across the Book of Mormon those very words are the ones most likely to be altered or left out, by a wide margin, which is the reverse of the fingerprint copying leaves.
The third says the book inherited the King James Bible's translation mistakes. The opposite is closer to the truth. Where the two part ways, the Book of Mormon tends to match the older, more accurate reading, at one verse keeping a full line no surviving Bible kept, and elsewhere matching ancient manuscripts that were not discovered until a century after 1830.
A fourth points not to copying but to later editing: four verses where Joseph added the words "the Son of" for an 1837 edition. Those four verses are the whole of the doctrinal-change charge.
And the scale settles the rest. Word-for-word Bible quotation is only about six or seven percent of a 270,000-word book. Even those passages get reworked rather than copied: the book's own prophets quote Isaiah and then apply it to their own story. The book opens with a family fleeing Jerusalem around 600 BC, carrying their Hebrew scriptures with them. A family like that, quoting Isaiah from memory, is exactly what the story would lead you to expect.
"There were never any Nephites"
The next three claims switch tactics. Instead of explaining how Joseph wrote the book, they try to show there was nothing to write about, that the ancient American peoples the book describes never existed at all.
The headline argument is genetics. If today's Native Americans descend from a family of Israelites, the reasoning goes, their DNA should look Middle Eastern, and instead it looks Asian. The weak link is the premise.
A single family that marries into a much larger population already living in the Americas would, twenty-six centuries on, leave almost nothing behind in the gene pool, and a single family is exactly the arrival the book describes. So the genetic evidence settles the question neither way, which is a far cry from the airtight case the CES Letter promises.
The second argument is anachronisms, things the book mentions that supposedly did not exist in the ancient Americas, like barley, horses, or steel. The list keeps shrinking.
Barley, called impossible for a century, was found at pre-Columbian sites in 1983. A sword of iron hardened into steel, from Laban's own century, the "impossible" object of First Nephi, was dug out of the ground in the Near East. For the whole list of thirteen, the CES Letter cites a single source, Wikipedia, and several of these supposed blunders have since resolved in the book's favor.
The third is the bald claim of "absolutely no archaeological evidence." Say "none, anywhere" and a single discovery is enough to undo you. In Yemen, archaeologists unearthed three ancient altars carved with the tribal name NHM, right where the book sets a stop it calls "Nahom", at the exact bend in the route where the next verse turns the family east toward the sea.[2] The archaeological record is thinner than a believer might wish, yet it is nothing remotely like the blank the CES Letter paints.
As for geography, the Church has refused to pin Book of Mormon places to real-world spots since the 1920s, for the plain reason that the text never gives any coordinates to begin with. And the popular map that lines Nephite names up with villages near Joseph's childhood home comes apart once you check the dates: a number of those villages did not even get their names until after 1830.
Some of this does cut against the believer, and the linked articles say as much. No city in the book has yet been matched to a dug-up site, and large-scale ironworking in the ancient Americas has still not turned up. What none of that supports is the absolute "nothing has ever been found" the whole section leans on.
"He borrowed it from books of his own day"
The last argument comes back to the how. It points to three books printed before 1830 and says Joseph borrowed from them, laying all three side by side as if they backed each other up.
They do not back each other up. No one could have copied from all three, since the three contradict the Book of Mormon, and contradict each other, on nearly every point that counts. When a theory has to reach for three sources that cancel one another out, it is still looking for its first real one.
View of the Hebrews, an 1823 book arguing that American Indians descended from Israel, is the one the Church supposedly buried, which is a strange thing to say about a book BYU reprinted in 1996. A line-by-line comparison turns up 84 substantive differences, and the handful of shared themes belonged to dozens of books floating around in the 1820s.
The Late War and The First Book of Napoleon were each written to sound like the King James Bible on purpose, and that shared imitation is the entire resemblance. Run the critics' own statistical test and The First Book of Napoleon comes out a weaker match to the Book of Mormon than a random tariff pamphlet that got tossed into the same comparison. Go down to the grammar and the gap widens: of twenty-five such imitations, not one contains even a single example of a sentence form the Book of Mormon uses 235 times, one that had dropped out of English roughly two centuries before Joseph was born. Its grammar belongs to an English older than any book he could have copied.
The case for the defense
For all its objections, the section never puts the other side of the ledger on the table: the features of the book that get harder to explain, not easier, the closer you look.
Take the names first. Alma shows up as a man's name in the book, which looked like a plain blunder in 1829, since to an English ear Alma is a woman's name. Then, lifetimes later, archaeologists pulled an ancient land deed from a cave in the Judean desert with Alma on it as a Hebrew man's name.
Sariah, what the book calls Lehi's wife, later showed up on a Jewish document from Egypt.[3] A peer-reviewed catalog now counts sixteen names from the book that appear in old Hebrew inscriptions and nowhere in the English Bible,[4] next to 188 more the Bible never supplies.[5]
Then there is the geography, the part that checks out a world away from upstate New York. The desert stop is only the start of it. Strike east from that real Arabian site and you reach one of the few green, fertile patches on the whole coast, which is just where the book sends the family to build a ship and which it names Bountiful. Add to that Hebrew poetry no one in Joseph's day was even looking for, like chiasmus, a mirror-image word pattern the ancients valued, plus separate writing voices a computer can statistically pull apart.
And under everything else lies the simplest fact of all, the one about how the book came to exist. A farm boy in his early twenties, with almost no schooling and no draft or notes in front of him, spoke the entire book out loud, straight through in order, across a few short months, and never went back to fix what he had already dictated.
The people taking it down by hand saw the whole thing and afterward put their names to written testimony they would not later take back, some of them years after leaving the Church on bitter terms. The handful of his own letters that survive from those years sound nothing like it. The naturalistic how this entire section is built to supply never once shows its face.
The letter swung at the keystone first, betting the rest of its case would topple once the foundation broke. The foundation did not break.
What the CES Letter actually stacks up against the book is a long pile of quick claims, and the pile keeps shrinking the slower you read. What stands on the other side is a short, stubborn set of facts that hold up to checking.
The articles here walk through both sides, hard parts and all. Read them, then open the Book of Mormon for yourself and weigh it.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," pp. 8–27. The section opens (p. 8) with two epigraphs framing the book as all-or-nothing: Ezra Taft Benson ("the Book of Mormon is the keystone of [our] testimony. Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, so does all the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon") and Jeffrey R. Holland ("a 'sudden death' proposition... Either the Book of Mormon is what the Prophet Joseph said it is or this Church and its founder are false, fraudulent, a deception from the first instance onward"). Page and claim numbers for individual arguments are given in the linked topical articles. ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2012): 78–98. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-history-of-nahom. Documents the three limestone altars (8th–7th centuries BC) recovered near Marib, Yemen, dedicated by a member of the Nihm tribe (NHM), matching the Book of Mormon place "Nahom" (1 Nephi 16:34) at the latitude where the narrative turns eastward (1 Nephi 17:1). ↩︎
On Alma as an attested ancient Hebrew male name (the Bar Kokhba deed of "Alma son of Judah," first published in Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba, 1971), see Neal Rappleye and Allen Hansen, "More Evidence for Alma as a Semitic Name," Interpreter 62 (2024): 415–428. On Sariah in a 5th-century BC Aramaic ostracon from Elephantine, see Neal Rappleye, "Revisiting 'Sariah' at Elephantine," Interpreter 32 (2019): 1–8. ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, John Gee, and Matthew Roper, "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 1 (2000): 40–51. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol9/iss1/11/. A peer-reviewed catalog of sixteen Book of Mormon names attested in ancient Hebrew inscriptions, none of which appear in the English Bible. ↩︎
Sharon Black and Brad Wilcox, "188 Unexplainable Names: Book of Mormon Names No Fiction Writer Would Choose," Religious Educator 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–133. https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-12-no-2-2011/188-unexplainable-names-book-mormon-names-no-fiction-writer-would-choose. Counts 337 proper names in the Book of Mormon, 188 of them unique to it. ↩︎