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.
The CES Letter is right about one thing. The Book of Mormon is the decisive question. If it survives the CES Letter's best efforts — and it does — then every secondary concern must be weighed against a keystone that held.
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 with no individual discussion.[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 it.[5]
The strategy is accumulation. Stack enough concerns fast enough that 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.[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 KJV phrases pulled from 25 scattered pages, stitched together with ellipses — and the text is misquoted.
The CES Letter never commits to one theory because none work alone. When you need three mutually exclusive explanations, you don't have one.
Tripling the count
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] Presenting them as three independent problems 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.[8]
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.
60 days, no notes, no revisions
The Book of Mormon — 269,000+ 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."[9]
Oliver Cowdery purchased a Bible on October 8, 1829 — months after the translation was completed.[10] No outline. No notes. 337 proper names, three calendar systems, and over 550 internally consistent geographic references — dictated orally, with no maps.[11]
Readings confirmed a century later
The Dead Sea Scrolls were 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.[12] A plagiarist working from a KJV Bible should produce zero readings confirmed by manuscripts buried in caves until 1947.
At 3 Nephi 12:22, the Book of Mormon omits "without a cause" from the Sermon on the Mount. The earliest Greek manuscripts all lack the phrase. The critical analysis confirming the omission wasn't published until 1956.[13]
The anachronism trend line
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.[14]
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.
Nahom and the Arabian trail
Three votive altars bearing the tribal name NHM, discovered 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. 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."[15]
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. 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. 9-11. ↩︎
Stan Spencer, "Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith as an Unlearned Reader," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 38 (2020): 45-106. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/missing-words/ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
Matthew Roper, "Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 65 (2025): 1-280. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/anachronisms-accidental-evidence-in-book-of-mormon-criticisms-introduction. Of 226 tracked claims: 91.2% unconfirmed in 1844, 9.3% unconfirmed by 2024. ↩︎
Terryl L. Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩︎