Appearance
The First Book of Napoleon
The claim:
"Another fascinating book published in 1809, The First Book of Napoleon... When I first read this along with other passages from The First Book of Napoleon, I was floored. Here we have two early 19th century contemporary books written at least a decade before the Book of Mormon that not only read and sound like the Book of Mormon but also contain so many of the Book of Mormon's parallels and themes as well."[1]
The CES Letter quotes six verses from the opening chapter of a satirical pamphlet about Napoleon Bonaparte, then presents a side-by-side "comparison" of phrases connected by ellipses.
What are those ellipses hiding?
A satirical pamphlet about Napoleon
The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth was published in Edinburgh in 1809 by Michael Linning, a Scottish solicitor writing under the pen name "Eliakim the Scribe."[2] It is a political satire about the French Revolution and Napoleon's rise to power, written in imitation King James Bible English.
Here is what the two books look like side by side.
| Feature | The First Book of Napoleon | Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|
| Length | ~22,500 words | ~268,000 words (12x longer) |
| Setting | France, Italy, Egypt | Ancient Americas and Near East |
| Subject | Napoleon's military tyranny | Thousand-year Israelite civilization |
| Genre | Political satire | Religious scripture |
| Characters | Napoleon, Louis XVI, European figures | 337 distinct named individuals |
| Theology | None | Covenant theology centered on Jesus Christ |
| Geography | Real European nations | Internally consistent New World system |
Zero overlap on setting, characters, plot, theology, or narrative structure. The only shared feature is the stylistic register: both imitate the King James Bible.
Read It Yourself
The full text of The First Book of Napoleon is freely available on Archive.org. Read it and decide whether it could be a source for the Book of Mormon.
The ellipsis trick
The CES Letter's centerpiece is a side-by-side "comparison":[1:1]
Napoleon: "Condemn not the (writing)...an account...the First Book of Napoleon...upon the face of the earth...it came to pass...the land...their inheritances their gold and silver and...the commandments of the Lord...the foolish imaginations of their hearts...small in stature...Jerusalem...because of the perverse wickedness of the people."
Book of Mormon: "Condemn not the (writing)...an account...the First Book of Nephi...upon the face of the earth...it came to pass...the land...his inheritance...and his gold and his silver and...the commandments of the Lord...the foolish imaginations of his heart...large in stature...Jerusalem...because of the wickedness of the people."
Looks striking at first glance. Now check where those Napoleon phrases actually come from.
Pages i, ii, iii, v, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 21, and 25. Twelve word groups harvested across twenty-five pages of source text -- the title page, the table of contents, the preface, and three separate chapters.[3]
The CES Letter includes a parenthetical: "note: these are not direct paragraphs." That is an understatement. They are not paragraphs at all. They are individual words ripped from completely different contexts and arranged to look like a parallel passage.
You could do this with any two books written in English. Pull a word here, a phrase there, connect the dots with ellipses. The Debunking CES Letter analysis calls this technique the most egregious deception in the entire Letter.[3:1]
Every shared phrase is KJV vocabulary
Every phrase in the "comparison" traces directly to the King James Bible.
| Shared Phrase | KJV Occurrences |
|---|---|
| "it came to pass" | ~727 times[4] |
| "the land" | 1,500+ times |
| "upon the face of the earth" | 29 times |
| "the commandments of the Lord" | 30+ times |
| "gold and silver" | 110+ times |
| "foolish imaginations" | Variant of Jeremiah 3:17, Romans 1:21 |
| "Jerusalem" | 811 times |
| "inheritance(s)" | 263 times |
Both texts imitate the King James Bible. Both therefore contain KJV vocabulary. That tells you about the genre, not about influence.
The CES Letter does not identify a single phrase, idea, narrative element, or theological concept shared between the two books that does not appear in the King James Bible. Not one.
The text is misquoted
The original text reads "the wickedness and perverseness of the people."[5] The CES Letter rearranges this to "the perverse wickedness of the people" -- moving "perverse" from a noun in its own clause to an adjective modifying "wickedness." The alteration makes the Napoleon phrase look closer to the Book of Mormon's "the wickedness of the people."
One of the "parallels" -- "small in stature" vs. "large in stature" -- is an opposite, not a parallel. Including it in a list of similarities is misleading on its face.
A genre, not a source
The CES Letter presents The First Book of Napoleon as though its resemblance to the Book of Mormon is unique and surprising. It is not.
Historian Eran Shalev documented an entire genre of "pseudo-biblicism" in the early Anglo-American world. His peer-reviewed research in Church History identified over twenty books published between 1742 and 1832 that used the same imitation KJV style -- numbered verses, "it came to pass," "spake," "-eth" verb endings, the full apparatus.[6]
A partial list:
| Title | Author | Year |
|---|---|---|
| The Chronicle of the Kings of England | Robert Dodsley | 1744 |
| The First Book of the American Chronicles | John Leacock | 1775 |
| The American Revolution; Written in the Style of Antiquity | Richard Snowden | 1793 |
| The First Book of Napoleon | Michael Linning | 1809 |
| The Late War | Gilbert Hunt | 1816 |
These were overwhelmingly secular texts -- political satire, war chronicles, schoolbooks. Providence was largely absent. The style was a literary convention, not a religious claim.[6:1]
Finding KJV vocabulary shared between The First Book of Napoleon and the Book of Mormon is exactly as significant as finding that two legal briefs both say "whereas."
No evidence Joseph Smith ever saw it
No document, letter, diary entry, library record, or contemporary account places The First Book of Napoleon in Joseph Smith's hands.[7]
The book was published in Edinburgh for a British audience. It had limited circulation. No bookseller in Smith's region is documented as stocking it. No critic of Joseph Smith in his lifetime -- and there were many, actively looking for plagiarism sources -- ever mentioned it.
The theory requires an obscure Scottish pamphlet to have crossed the Atlantic, traveled to rural upstate New York, and landed in the hands of a frontier farmer who then ignored everything in it except twelve common English words.
Three theories that cancel each other out
The CES Letter presents The First Book of Napoleon alongside View of the Hebrews and The Late War as a cumulative case. Three books, presented together, are supposed to look more damning than one.
They do not. These are mutually exclusive theories. If the Book of Mormon came from one source, the others are irrelevant. You cannot combine contradictory explanations and call the stack "evidence." The View of the Hebrews article examines this problem in detail, including why the parallel-finding method itself is broken.
What no parallel text can explain
Stack all three proposed sources together. They still cannot account for the Book of Mormon's chiastic structures, Hebraisms, confirmed ancient names, or a 268,000-word text dictated in roughly 60 working days with no outline and no revisions.[8]
The sister articles cover this positive evidence in depth: View of the Hebrews addresses the specific features no 19th-century source can explain, and The Late War covers the syntax, geography, and dictation evidence.
Bottom line: The CES Letter's First Book of Napoleon "comparison" pulls twelve common English words from twenty-five scattered pages of a Scottish satirical pamphlet, stitches them together with ellipses, misquotes the text to tighten a parallel that does not exist, and calls the result evidence. Every shared phrase traces to the King James Bible. The two books share no characters, no setting, no plot, no theology -- nothing. This is the weakest of the CES Letter's parallel text claims, and the other two are not strong.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 10, pp. 24-25. ↩︎ ↩︎
Michael Linning WS (1774-1838) was a Scottish solicitor who attended Glasgow College from 1788 to 1793. He published The First Book of Napoleon in Edinburgh in 1809 under the pen name "Eliakim the Scribe." See "Michael Linning," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Linning ↩︎
"FBN Excerpt Comparison," Debunking the CES Letter. The Napoleon phrases are drawn from pages i, ii, iii, v, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 21, and 25 -- spanning the title page, table of contents, preface, and three chapters. https://debunking-cesletter.com/book-of-mormon-1/first-book-of-napoleon-comparison/ ↩︎ ↩︎
The Hebrew wayehi appears roughly 1,200 times in the Hebrew Bible. KJV translators rendered it as "and it came to pass" approximately 727 times. See Robert F. Smith, "'It Came to Pass' in the Bible and the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report (1980). https://rsc.byu.edu/preserved-translation/it-came-pass ↩︎
Michael Linning, The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth (Edinburgh, 1809), 25. The original reads "the wickedness and perverseness of the people," not the rearranged "the perverse wickedness of the people" that appears in the CES Letter's comparison. ↩︎
Eran Shalev, "'Written in the Style of Antiquity': Pseudo-Biblicism and the Early American Republic, 1770-1830," Church History 79, no. 4 (December 2010): 800-830. See also Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), ch. 3. ↩︎ ↩︎
"Was the beginning of the Book of Mormon derived from The First Book of Napoleon?" FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Question:_Was_the_beginning_of_the_Book_of_Mormon_derived_from_''The_First_Book_of_Napoleon''%3F ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: 'Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'" BYU Studies Quarterly 57, no. 4 (2018): 10-50. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/ ↩︎