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's First Book of Napoleon section is unusually short — barely a page and a half — and it does most of its work through impression rather than argument.[1:1] It quotes the opening verses of an obscure 1809 Scottish satire, reports that the author was "floored" by the resemblance, and presents a side-by-side comparison framed as showing "selected phrases the Book of Mormon is known for from the beginning portion of the Book of Mormon with the same order in the beginning portion of The First Book of Napoleon."[1:2] The parenthetical note — "these are not direct paragraphs" — is the only acknowledgment that the comparison is doing something other than what it appears to be doing.[1:3]
This article takes the claim seriously enough to engage both versions of it. The first is the CES Letter's specific argument: that the side-by-side comparison demonstrates a textual relationship between the two books. That argument depends on a comparison whose construction will not survive examination. The phrases on the First Book of Napoleon (FBN) side are harvested from twelve different locations across twenty-five pages of source material — including the title page, table of contents, preface, errata page, and three separate chapters — stitched together with twelve sets of ellipses.[2] One pair is an antonym presented as a similarity. One pair inserts a bracketed word that does not exist in either source as the comparison frames it. And one pair quotes the chapter-summary recap rather than the body verse, where the underlying narrative text reads quite differently. Every shared phrase, without exception, also appears in the King James Bible.[3]
The second, stronger version of the criticism is not what the CES Letter argues, but it is the version a serious academic critic would defend: the Book of Mormon emerged into a documented literary genre — pseudo-biblicism — in which biblical-style writing was a reproducible cultural form. The non-Latter-day Saint historian Eran Shalev has documented this genre across three peer-reviewed publications with Yale University Press and Oxford University Press, and his case deserves engagement on its own terms.[4][5][6] This article engages that version too.
Both versions ultimately collapse, but for different reasons. The CES Letter's specific comparison collapses on textual examination — the phrases were not where the comparison says they were and did not say what the comparison says they said. The cultural-milieu version survives that examination but cannot account for what makes the Book of Mormon different in kind from FBN: Early Modern English syntactic patterns Linning never produced, Hebraisms absent from the King James Bible, internally consistent geography across 269,000 words, distinguishable authorial voices, and confirmed ancient names like Nahom — none of which the pseudo-biblical genre predicts and none of which appear in FBN.
What the CES Letter's section does accomplish is real: the opening verses of FBN do produce a cognitive shock for a reader steeped in Book of Mormon language. That impression is not manufactured; it is genuine. It is also genre. The argument of this article is that the surface impression is fully explained by the well-documented pseudo-biblical convention, and that nothing beneath the surface — content, structure, syntax, production circumstances — supports any meaningful relationship between the two books.
Context and Background
What The First Book of Napoleon Actually Is
The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth: Written in the 5813th Year of the World, and 1809th Year of the Christian Era was published in 1809 in Edinburgh, attributed on the title page to "Eliakim the Scribe" — described as "a descendant of a modern branch of the tribe of Levi; A Rabbi educated in the Christian schools of the sons of the prophets."[7] The pseudonym is misleading. The actual author was Michael Linning (1774–1838), a Scottish solicitor.[8]
Linning's identification is not speculative. The State Library of New South Wales holds a pre-publication manuscript of FBN — a fair copy made by Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell while staying with the Linning family at Peggy's Mill in 1809. Mitchell, who later became Surveyor General of New South Wales, prepared the manuscript before the book was printed; the document explicitly identifies Linning as the author.[8:1] The Saints Unscripted YouTube treatment of FBN credits the State Library of New South Wales staff for sending images of the manuscript directly, and notes that Linning later married Janet Wilson (1777–1862).[9][8:2] Linning attended Glasgow College from 1788 to 1793 and qualified as a Writer to His Majesty's Signet — a Scottish legal officer whose role, as one biographical sketch notes, was "very similar to the ancient biblical role of scribe."[8:3] The pseudonym "Eliakim" appears to be a reversed spelling of "Mikaile" (Michael), pairing the wordplay with the scribal pun.[8:4] Linning later proposed (in 1816) the National Monument of Scotland as a memorial to Scottish casualties of the Napoleonic Wars and in 1837 patented a peat-to-fuel conversion process before his death the following year.[8:5]
The book itself is a 161-page political satire in twenty-three numbered chapters, totaling roughly 22,500 words including front matter.[7:1] It chronicles Napoleon's rise from the French Revolution through the Egypt campaign and into the Napoleonic Wars, presented as a biblical-style "chronicle" with numbered verses, archaic vocabulary, and prophetic cadence. It contains a parable of the Bear and the Monkey (chapter 16) in which the Monkey transforms into a Tiger and devours the Bear; a horned idol in chapter 1 inscribed with "Sedition, Privy Conspiracy, and Rebellion"; a vision in which Napoleon transforms into a dragon (chapters 17–19); and warnings to "Albion" (Britain) about the cost of resisting tyranny (chapters 20–23).[7:2][10] These elements have no analogue in the Book of Mormon. No Christology, no atonement theology, no covenant framework, and no religious narrative appear anywhere in FBN's twenty-three chapters. Providence is invoked rhetorically to frame Napoleon's ascent as divine punishment for French wickedness, but the book is a political document, not a religious one. No "Second Book of Napoleon" was ever written, despite the title implying a series.[8:6]
The book was sold by four British Isles booksellers: Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme of London (Paternoster Row); J.J. Stockdale of Pall-mall, London; P. Hill of Edinburgh; and M. Keene of Dublin.[7:3] No American printer, publisher, or bookseller appears in the imprint. The 1810 British Critic — the only major contemporary review of the book that has been located — observed that the language "would be peculiarly effective on the minds of those pious Christians, in humble life, who were accustomed to read and revere their Bibles," but that "the price at which a book so elegantly printed could be sold would prevent it from falling into the hands of such persons."[8:7] By 1908, The Nation magazine described FBN as "very curious as well as rare."[8:8] No American edition has been documented anywhere in the bibliographic record. The earliest American printings are 21st-century on-demand reprints from imprints like Leopold Classic Library, Forgotten Books, and similar print-on-demand operations — well over a century after the Book of Mormon's 1830 publication.[11][12]
Read It Yourself
The full text of The First Book of Napoleon is freely available on Archive.org and Wikisource. Reading even the first chapter cold — before being told it parallels the Book of Mormon — produces a very different impression than reading it after being primed. What you encounter is a short Scottish pamphlet about Napoleon Bonaparte that uses biblical-sounding language. The chapter 1 cadence is real and is genuinely arresting on first reading. But the chapters that follow describe French Revolutionary armies, the Egypt campaign, naval engagements, a parable of the Bear and the Monkey, and a vision in which Napoleon transforms into a dragon. There is no Christology, no covenant theology, no internally consistent geography, no missionary discourse, no atonement doctrine. Reading FBN is the strongest single test of the CES Letter's claim. Most readers find the test resolves the question in a single sitting.
A Side-by-Side of What the Two Books Actually Contain
Before evaluating individual phrases, it is worth seeing what the two texts are actually about. Phrase comparisons isolate words from context; a feature comparison forces the question of whether the books resemble each other in any way that matters.
| Feature | The First Book of Napoleon | Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|
| Length | ~22,500 words (161 pages) | ~269,510 words (~588 pages); roughly 12x longer[13] |
| Setting | France, Italy, Egypt, Britain (real European geography) | Ancient Near East and the Americas |
| Time period | Roughly 1789–1805 (~16 years) | Roughly 2200 BC – AD 421 (~2,600 years) |
| Subject | Napoleon's military tyranny and the French Revolution | A thousand-year Israelite civilization in the Americas; the visit of the resurrected Christ |
| Genre | Political satire / prophetic warning against tyranny | Religious scripture / sacred history |
| Characters | Napoleon, Louis XVI, European rulers, "Eliakim" the narrator | Approximately 337 distinct named individuals[14] |
| Theology | Essentially none; Providence invoked but not developed | Sustained covenant theology centered on Jesus Christ across nearly every section |
| Geographic system | Real European nations anyone with a map could verify | Internally consistent New World geography across 150+ place names[15] |
| Narrative structure | Linear chronicle of a 16-year military campaign | Multi-author work spanning ~2,600 years with embedded documents, sermons, letters, and poetry |
| Number of authorial voices | One (Linning under a pseudonym) | Multiple, statistically distinguishable[16] |
| Author's purpose | Political commentary on contemporary events | Religious conversion and spiritual instruction |
There is zero overlap on setting, characters, plot, theology, narrative structure, geographic system, or number of authorial voices. The only point of resemblance is the stylistic register: both texts imitate the King James Bible's vocabulary and cadence. As the analysis below demonstrates, even that imitation differs in depth and character.
Pseudo-Biblicism as a Literary Genre
The resemblance between FBN and the Book of Mormon is not unique. It is generic. Pseudo-biblical writing — narratives composed in deliberate imitation of King James Bible English, with numbered verses, archaic pronouns, and prophetic cadence — was a recognized literary genre in Britain and America from approximately 1740 through 1850.[5:1][4:1]
The non-Latter-day Saint historian Eran Shalev, of the University of Haifa, has documented this genre across three peer-reviewed publications: a 2010 article in Church History titled "'Written in the Style of Antiquity': Pseudo-Biblicism and the Early American Republic, 1770–1830"; chapter 3 of his 2013 book American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War (Yale University Press); and a 2019 chapter in Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press).[5:2][4:2][6:1] Shalev's central thesis — discussed at length in the steelman section below — is that this "unique and forgotten tradition" was the product of an age "still suffused with the Bible yet at the same time Enlightened as to the liberal use of that book's language."[4:3]
A partial catalog of texts in the genre:
| Year | Author | Title | Country |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1740 | Robert Dodsley | The Chronicle of the Kings of England | British (American reprints from 1744) |
| 1774–1775 | John Leacock | The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times | American |
| 1793 | Richard Snowden | The American Revolution; Written in the Style of Ancient History | American (school adoption) |
| 1809 | Michael Linning | The First Book of Napoleon | British (Edinburgh) |
| 1816 | Gilbert Hunt | The Late War | American (school adoption 1817–1819) |
| 1830s | Anonymous | The Book of Nullification | American |
Plus dozens of newspaper columns, political pamphlets, and shorter pieces.[5:3][17] These texts share a common toolkit: numbered verses, "it came to pass," "thee" and "thou," "-eth" verb endings, the "of the Lord" formula, and a quasi-prophetic narrative voice. They were overwhelmingly secular in content. Providence might be invoked for rhetorical force, but theology was rarely developed. The genre was a rhetorical mode, not a religious one.[5:4][18] Pseudo-biblical writing was, in Shalev's framing, "constructive estrangement" — simultaneously placing American (or, in Linning's case, British) experience into a biblical timeframe and harnessing the King James Bible's authority for present purposes.[5:5]
This matters because finding KJV-style vocabulary shared between two pseudo-biblical texts is exactly what the genre predicts. The Sarah Allen rebuttal at FAIR puts it directly: pseudo-biblical KJV-imitation writing "was pretty popular from approximately 1750 to approximately 1850, about 100 years."[19] Two pseudo-biblical texts will share KJV phrases for the same reason two fairy tales share "once upon a time" — it is a feature of the form. The relevant question is what, beyond the genre conventions, the two texts actually share.
Analysis
The CES Letter's Comparison Deconstructed
The centerpiece of the CES Letter's FBN argument is a side-by-side comparison of phrases from the two books, framed as appearing "in the same order in the beginning portion" of each.[1:4] The Napoleon side reads:
"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."[1:5]
The Book of Mormon side reads:
"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."[1:6]
Twelve fragments per side, twelve sets of ellipses, framed as parallel sequential text. The CES Letter notes parenthetically that "these are not direct paragraphs" — the only signal that the comparison is constructed rather than continuous.[1:7] What that admission understates is the scale of the construction.
The Phrases Are Not "In the Same Order"
The most testable factual claim in the CES Letter's section is that the phrases appear "in the same order in the beginning portion of The First Book of Napoleon."[1:8] Mapping each fragment to its actual location in the source text shows that this claim is false:
| # | CES Letter (FBN side) | Actual FBN location |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | "Condemn not the (writing)" | Eliakim's Address (preface), front matter |
| 2 | "an account" | Eliakim's Address (preface), front matter |
| 3 | "the First Book of Napoleon" | Title page, front matter |
| 4 | "upon the face of the earth" | Chapter 1, verse 1, p. 9 |
| 5 | "it came to pass" | Chapter 1, verse 1, p. 9 |
| 6 | "the land" | Chapter 1, verse 2, p. 9 |
| 7 | "their inheritances their gold and silver" | Chapter 1, verse 5, p. 10 |
| 8 | "the commandments of the Lord" | Chapter 1, verse 10, p. 12 |
| 9 | "the foolish imaginations of their hearts" | Chapter 2, verse 10, p. 17 |
| 10 | "small in stature" | Chapter 3, verse 2, p. 19 |
| 11 | "Jerusalem" | Chapter 3, verse 7, p. 21 |
| 12 | "because of the perverse wickedness of the people" | Chapter 3 summary (table of contents) recapping ch. 3:21 |
The phrases are drawn from pages i, ii, iii, v, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 21, and 25 — spanning the title page, the table of contents, the preface, the errata page, and three separate chapters across the first quarter of the book.[2:1] As Sarah Allen documents in her FAIR rebuttal, this means the comparison "took 25 pages of the book to compile" — "a full 1/6 of the book was used to recreate one incomplete paragraph of text."[19:1] The Book of Mormon side is similarly stitched: Allen notes that it pulls from "three chapters and the title page, 11 pages altogether, and it bounces all over the place."[19:2]
This is not "the same order in the beginning portion." It is a curated harvest from one-sixth of an entire book, presented to look like sequential text. The technique is not invisible to a reader who checks — but most readers will not check. The CES Letter's section depends on this.
The Comparison Quotes Chapter Summaries and Inserts Bracketed Words
Beyond the structural issue with the ellipses, the CES Letter's comparison takes liberties with the source text. Each liberty has the same effect: tightening an apparent parallel that does not exist in the actual narrative verse.
"Because of the perverse wickedness of the people." The phrase "perverse wickedness of the people" does appear verbatim in FBN — but not in the body of chapter 3, verse 21. It appears in the chapter 3 summary in the book's front-matter table of contents, where Linning recaps the chapter's contents: "hardeneth the Tyrant's heart, because of the perverse wickedness of the people. Page 19."[7:4] The actual narrative verse the summary points to (Ch. 3, v. 21, p. 25) reads: "And it pleased the Lord, as a punishment for the wickedness and perverseness of the people, to deliver into the hands of this man the dominion over many lands."[7:5] The CES Letter quotes the summary phrase as if it were a body-text passage, alongside Book of Mormon passages that are body-text. Chapter recaps in pseudo-biblical writing borrow stock biblical descriptors precisely because they need to summarize a chapter in one sentence; the underlying narrative verse uses a structurally different coordinate clause.
| Source | Actual text | Where it sits in the book |
|---|---|---|
| FBN, ch. 3 chapter summary (front matter) | "the perverse wickedness of the people" | Recap of chapter contents, generic biblical-style framing |
| FBN, ch. 3:21 (p. 25, body) | "the wickedness and perverseness of the people" | The actual narrative verse the chapter summary points to |
| Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 3 area) | "the wickedness of the people" | Body narrative verse |
The "perverse wickedness" phrase additionally appears elsewhere in FBN as a stock biblical-style descriptor for sin (chapter 2, verse 10, "the perverse wickedness of the Gauls" and a similar later use).[7:6] It is not a Book-of-Mormon-specific phrase; it is a stock pseudo-biblical descriptor available to any KJV imitator — the same "perverse" / "wickedness" word-pair the King James Bible deploys (compare 2 Samuel 22:27; Proverbs 4:24; Numbers 22:32).
"Condemn not the (writing)." The bracketed "(writing)" is more striking. The actual FBN passage, in the preface (Eliakim's Address), reads: "condemn not the feebly imitative manner of writing therein occasionally employed."[7:7] The actual Book of Mormon passage is on the title page: "Condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ." Neither phrase contains the word "(writing)" alone. The CES Letter inserts a parenthetical "(writing)" — a word that does not exist in either text as the comparison frames it — to bridge two phrases whose only shared words are "Condemn not the." Without the bracketed insertion, the parallel does not exist.
| Source | Actual text |
|---|---|
| FBN preface (Eliakim's Address) | "condemn not the feebly imitative manner of writing therein occasionally employed" |
| Book of Mormon title page | "Condemn not the things of God, that ye may be found spotless at the judgment-seat of Christ" |
| CES Letter (both sides) | "Condemn not the (writing)" |
The Comparison Includes an Antonym
One pairing in the comparison is not a parallel of any kind — it is an antonym presented as a similarity. The Napoleon side lists "small in stature"; the Book of Mormon side lists "large in stature."[1:9]
In FBN chapter 3, verse 2 (p. 19), the phrase appears as "this man, though small in stature, was nevertheless vast in spirit, and he not only conceived unto himself great and marvellous designs, but was moreover wicked, and cunning in council, mighty in deeds, and powerful in war."[7:8] The figure described is Napoleon. In 1 Nephi 2:16, the phrase appears as "I, Nephi, being exceedingly young, nevertheless being large in stature, and also having great desires to know of the mysteries of God, wherefore, I did cry unto the Lord; and behold he did visit me, and did soften my heart that I did believe all the words which had been spoken by my father." The figure described is Nephi.
Napoleon is small. Nephi is large. These are opposite descriptions of opposite characters. A reader scanning the side-by-side will notice "in stature" in both columns and not register the reversed adjective. Including an antonym in a list of similarities — without flagging the reversal — is misleading regardless of intent. The shared phrasing reflects a common English idiom — the construction "[adjective] in stature" appears in Luke 19:3 ("little of stature") and is a standard way of describing physical size. It is not evidence of textual dependence.
| Phrase | Subject | Description |
|---|---|---|
| "small in stature" (FBN 3:2) | Napoleon | Diminutive |
| "large in stature" (1 Ne. 2:16) | Nephi | Substantial |
The Methodological Frame: Sandmel's "Parallelomania"
The technique on display in the CES Letter's section has been recognized in biblical studies for over six decades. Samuel Sandmel, in his 1962 Society of Biblical Literature presidential address, coined the term "parallelomania" for "that extravagance among scholars which first overdoes the supposed similarity in passages and then proceeds to describe source and derivation as if implying literary connection flowing in an inevitable or predetermined direction."[20]
Douglas Salmon, applying Sandmel's framework to Latter-day Saint scholarship in Dialogue in 2000, articulated seven methodological questions for evaluating any claimed parallel.[21] The CES Letter's comparison fails several of Salmon's tests directly: the selection methodology is not stated, phrases are pulled out of context, and no provenance argument is made. Salmon also identifies what he calls the "extreme selectivity" problem: only texts that support the position are chosen, and they are excerpted without regard to their representation in the original source.[21:1] That description fits the FBN comparison precisely. William Hamblin's Review of Books on the Book of Mormon response accepts Salmon's criteria and frames specificity, distinctiveness, controlled comparison, and explicit access argument as the threshold a valid parallel must clear[22] — a threshold the CES Letter's twelve fragments do not approach.
The applied steps of Sandmel's parallelomania, in the CES Letter's hands, are clear: pick a target text and a candidate source text that share a common third source (here, the King James Bible); harvest from the candidate source any phrase that also appears in the target; and stitch the harvested phrases together with ellipses to create the appearance of sequential text. Apply this procedure to almost any two English texts of sufficient length, and apparent parallels will multiply. Benjamin McGuire applied a similar methodology to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and The Officer's Daughter (1810); after removing King James Bible phrases, the two share 1.4% overlap, more than five times the overlap between the Book of Mormon and The Late War (which is itself ranked higher than FBN by the same n-gram analysis discussed below).[23] No scholar has ever proposed that Jane Austen plagiarized that book. Jeff Lindsay, satirizing the technique, applied it to Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855) — published twenty-five years after the Book of Mormon — and produced an apparently compelling source case demonstrating "plagiarism" running backward through time.[24] The technique, deployed without controls, is unreliable as a source-detector.
A principled distinction is worth naming here, because this article later cites the absence of Book of Mormon syntactic features in pseudo-biblical texts (Carmack) as positive evidence.[25] Phrase-level matches between English texts that share the King James Bible as a third source are noisy in either direction; structural features like Early Modern English ditransitive command syntax, Hebrew if/and conditionals, and Latin-style possessive ratios are not generated by KJV imitation, so their presence or absence carries more signal than phrase parallels do.
The same dynamic appears in B.H. Roberts's 1985 review of View of the Hebrews parallels: Roberts catalogued more than eighty differences between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon — a dimension of the analysis that any honest parallel-finding exercise must include.[26] When the differences are tallied alongside the supposed parallels, the picture changes radically. The CES Letter's FBN comparison is silent on every difference between the two texts.
Every Shared Phrase Traces to the King James Bible
The single most important fact the CES Letter does not tell its reader is that every phrase shared between FBN and the Book of Mormon is also a King James Bible phrase. This is not a difficult fact to demonstrate — it has been documented systematically.
The Heavy Metal Book of Mormon analysis identified thirteen shared phrases between the two books and traced each to specific King James Bible chapter-and-verse provenance:[3:1]
| # | Shared Phrase | FBN Location | KJV Source | Book of Mormon Location |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | "the latter days" | 1:1 | Jer. 48:47 | 2 Ne. 3:5 |
| 2 | "the fear of the Lord" | 1:3 | Prov. 2:5 | Mosiah 4:1 |
| 3 | "imaginations of their hearts" | 1:3 | Jer. 3:17 | 1 Ne. 2:11 |
| 4 | "evil spirit" | 1:6 | Luke 8:2 | Mosiah 2:32 |
| 5 | "kings and rulers" | 1:7 | Mark 13:9 | 1 Ne. 16:38 |
| 6 | "true and living God" | 1:10 | Jer. 10:10 | Alma 11:27 |
| 7 | "great and marvelous" | 3:2 | Rev. 15:3 | 1 Ne. 1:14 |
| 8 | "blotted out" (names) | 11:2 | Deut. 9:14 | Mosiah 5:11 |
| 9 | "deliver into your hands" | 8:6 | 1 Chr. 14:10 | 1 Ne. 3:29 |
| 10 | "bold as lions" / "fight like lions" | 7:6 | Ps. 17:12; 1 Chr. 12:8 | Mosiah 20:10 |
| 11 | "gall of bitterness" | 6:13 | Acts 8:23 | Moroni 8:14 |
| 12 | "disappear as the dew before the sun" | 10:15 | Hosea 6:4 | Mormon 4:18 |
| 13 | "chaff before the wind" | 10:14 | Ps. 1:4 | Mormon 5:16 |
Plus additional shared phrases in the Heavy Metal catalog: "great and terrible," "he dreamed a dream," "rod of iron," modesty references, and "gray hairs with sorrow to the grave" — all of which have direct KJV antecedents.[3:2] The CES Letter's specific twelve fragments belong to the same pattern. "It came to pass" appears approximately 727 times in the King James Bible, where it translates the Hebrew narrative formula wayehi.[27] "Upon the face of the earth" appears 29 times in the KJV. "The commandments of the Lord" appears more than thirty times. "Gold and silver" appears more than 110 times. "Jerusalem" appears 811 times. "Inheritance" and its variants appear more than 260 times. "Foolish imaginations" is a variant of Jeremiah 3:17 and Romans 1:21.[27:1]
Heavy Metal's conclusion follows directly from the data: "Since a majority of the phrases found in the First Book of Napoleon and the Book of Mormon are also found in the Bible, there is no reason to believe that the First Book of Napoleon was a significant influence."[3:3] The phrases are not borrowed between the two books. They are independently borrowed from the King James Bible.
The Johnson 4-Gram Study and FBN's 0.06 Score
The CES Letter's Late War section (item 9, pp. 21–23) cites the WordTree Foundation 4-gram study by Chris and Duane Johnson, presented at the ExMormon Foundation conference in October 2013. That study compared the 1830 Book of Mormon against approximately 100,000–130,000 pre-1830 books from Archive.org, scoring shared four-word phrases for "contextual rarity."[28] The CES Letter relies on this study as the quantitative anchor for its Late War parallel claims and flags FBN as one of the books the study identified.
What the CES Letter does not report is FBN's actual score. The Johnson "Uniform Match Score" — the study's primary metric — measured each text's similarity to The Late War (which itself was ranked first against the Book of Mormon). On that metric:[23:1]
| Comparison | Uniform Match Score |
|---|---|
| The Late War vs. Book of Nullification | 0.37 |
| The Late War vs. Book of Mormon | 0.24 |
| The Late War vs. First Book of Napoleon | 0.06 |
The Book of Nullification — an anonymous political tract about the 1830s Nullification Crisis — registered as 50% more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon did. No scholar has ever proposed The Book of Nullification as a source for the Book of Mormon, and no one has proposed any plausible textual relationship between The Book of Nullification and The Late War. They both happen to be pseudo-biblical political texts of the era.
The relevant point for the FBN argument is that FBN scored 0.06 — four times lower than the Book of Mormon's score against The Late War and more than six times lower than The Book of Nullification's score against The Late War.[23:2] The CES Letter does not cite this number. Including it would expose that FBN sits at the bottom of the n-gram ranking, not the top. The same methodology that supposedly ranks The Late War as a striking parallel ranks FBN as a marginal one.
The Johnson study has never been published in a peer-reviewed venue, and Duane Johnson acknowledged on the project blog that "certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking."[28:1] The GitHub repository for the study contains TODO entries — "TODO: steps to reproduce scoring," "TODO: steps to reproduce ranking" — indicating the methodology was never fully documented for independent verification.[29]
McGuire's Methodological Critique
Benjamin McGuire's 2013 Interpreter article, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," is the most detailed methodological critique of the Johnson 4-gram study.[23:3] McGuire is a Latter-day Saint writing in a faith-affirming journal, but his critique addresses specific, independently verifiable methodological problems, several of which apply with greater force to FBN than to The Late War because FBN is shorter and more aggressively biblical in vocabulary.
McGuire identified five fundamental flaws:[23:4]
1. Text preparation problems. Roughly 13.7% of shared Book of Mormon–Late War 4-grams came from copyright-statement boilerplate — standard fill-in-the-blank language derived from the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790, appearing in virtually every American book published between 1790 and 1831. Neither Joseph Smith nor Gilbert Hunt authored those phrases; the U.S. Congress did. The same boilerplate would inflate any FBN comparison drawn from the same corpus.
2. Length disparity. The Book of Mormon contains approximately 269,510 words and roughly 202,830 unique 4-grams.[13:1] The Late War contains approximately 56,632 words. FBN contains approximately 22,500 — making FBN roughly twelve times shorter than the Book of Mormon. Any overlap appears proportionally more significant when texts of vastly different lengths are compared at the absolute level rather than as a proportion.
3. KJV filtering distortion. Approximately 57.3% of shared Book of Mormon–Late War 4-grams also appear in the King James Bible.[23:5] The Johnson study removed KJV-derived phrases before scoring, on the rationale of isolating non-biblical similarities. McGuire shows that this filter actually distorts the result: by stripping out the dominant shared source that explains most of the similarity, the procedure makes the residual handful of common English expressions appear artificially significant. For FBN, the percentage is likely higher than 57.3% because FBN imitates KJV vocabulary more aggressively in its opening chapters.
4. Weighting system defects. The Johnson system assigned inflated scores to rare phrases and minimal weight to common ones. The 75 copyright-statement phrases — a documented, demonstrable, non-authorial connection — collectively scored 0.33 weighted points, equivalent to a single "rare" phrase. McGuire characterizes this as inverting "scholarly standards where multiple independent sources reduce attribution value."[23:6]
5. Loss of textual context. Four-word sequences cross sentence boundaries, quotation marks, and paragraph breaks. Phrases that appear "in" both texts may be computational artifacts rather than authorial constructions.
McGuire then demonstrated the method's unreliability with a controlled false-positive test: applying the same procedure to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and The Officer's Daughter (1810) yields 1,677 shared 4-grams after removing KJV phrases — a 1.4% overlap, more than five times higher than the Book of Mormon–Late War overlap of 0.27%.[23:7] No scholar has ever proposed that Austen drew from that text. McGuire's withering observation: applied consistently, the method would tell us "Jane Austen's work was less influenced by her literary culture than the Book of Mormon" — a result so obviously absurd that it discredits the methodology.[23:8]
For FBN specifically, every one of these flaws applies. McGuire's broader conclusion — that the Johnson methodology detects genre similarity rather than textual dependence — explains why FBN scored 0.06 and The Book of Nullification scored 0.37. They are simply two pseudo-biblical political texts from the same general genre, and the 4-gram method is a genre detector, not a source detector.
Schaalje's Bayesian Analysis
G. Bruce Schaalje, a professor of statistics at Brigham Young University, applied Bayesian probability analysis to the Johnson n-gram data and concluded that Late War influence on the Book of Mormon is statistically unlikely.[30] Schaalje's analysis appeared on the Interpreter Foundation blog rather than in a peer-reviewed venue; the underlying Bayesian framework is standard, but the specific probability estimates have not been validated by independent statisticians.[30:1]
That said, the core reasoning does not depend on the specific priors. If one compares any text against 100,000 others, something will rank highest, even when the absolute level of similarity is trivially low (0.23%, in the Book of Mormon–Late War case). The question is whether the similarity exceeds what shared genre conventions would produce, and the false-positive controls — the Austen/Burney pair, The Book of Nullification — show that similar or higher overlap occurs across pairs with no plausible textual relationship.[30:2]
For FBN, the implication is stronger still: since FBN scored 0.06 against The Late War — well below both the Book of Mormon (0.24) and The Book of Nullification (0.37) — any Bayesian conclusion against Late War influence on the Book of Mormon applies with even greater force to FBN influence.
Stylistic Divergence Beyond the Surface
The CES Letter relies heavily on the reader's first impression of FBN's opening verses — the "I was floored" reaction.[1:10] That reaction is psychologically real and deserves direct treatment rather than dismissal.
Worth Acknowledging
The cadence of FBN chapter 1, verses 1–6 does genuinely sound like the Book of Mormon to a reader steeped in its language: "And behold it came to pass, in these latter days, that an evil spirit arose on the face of the earth, and greatly troubled the sons of men…the people who dwell in the land of Gaul…the fear of the Lord had not been for many generations…the imaginations of their hearts…they raged like unto the heathen, and they rose up against their lawful king…their inheritances, their gold and silver, corn and oil…all men being born equal, were free to act, each one according to the imaginations and devices of his own heart, without the fear of God."[7:9] The opening produces an immediate cognitive shock for a Latter-day Saint reader. That shock is real. It is not manufactured by the CES Letter; it is a feature of the text. Pretending the surface impression does not exist would be dishonest. The argument of this article is not that the surface impression is wrong but that it is fully accounted for by the well-documented pseudo-biblical genre — and that the deeper analysis below shows FBN and the Book of Mormon diverge sharply at every level beyond surface vocabulary.
The "floored" reaction also requires reading FBN after being told it parallels the Book of Mormon. Reading it cold, as the "Read It Yourself" callout above invites, produces a different experience: a short pamphlet about Napoleon Bonaparte that uses biblical-sounding language for political-satirical purposes.
When examined systematically, the two texts diverge stylistically even within the shared pseudo-biblical register. Matthew Roper (BYU Maxwell Institute / FAIR-affiliated) and Paul J. Fields (applied statistician), presenting at the 2014 FAIR Conference, conducted multivariate stylometric analysis of FBN, The Late War, Snowden's American Revolution, the King James Bible, and the 1830 Book of Mormon across four dimensions of KJV-style analysis.[18:1] The underlying statistical methods are standard, and the input data (counts of structural words, archaic pronouns, distinguishing phrases, and Latin-style possessives in published texts) is independently auditable.[18:2]
Non-contextual (structural) words — articles, prepositions, conjunctions like "the," "and," "but," "of." Result: the Book of Mormon and the King James Bible "are about twice as similar to each other" in structural word usage as the pseudo-biblical texts are to the King James Bible. Pseudo-biblical texts cluster together — about "five times stronger" in similarity to each other than to the Book of Mormon.[18:3]
Archaic words and pronouns — "thee," "thou," "ye," "-eth" verb endings. Result: "the Book of Mormon and the King James version are almost identical in the use of those words," while pseudo-biblical texts including FBN use these terms "much less, with much less frequency."[18:4]
Distinguishing phrases — characteristic combinations like "of the Lord." Result: the Book of Mormon and the King James Bible are "approximately seven times more similar in distinguishing phrase usage" than pseudo-biblical texts are. Pseudo-biblical texts share patterns with each other "over 12 times more similar" than they share with the Book of Mormon.[18:5]
Content topics — religious vs. military/political. Result: religious references appear "very high" in both Book of Mormon and KJV, while The American Revolution and The Late War registered "almost zero" religious topics.[18:6] FBN — focused on Napoleon's military campaigns and the French Revolution — has near-zero religious content of its own.
Roper and Fields also tracked two related Latin-style features. Latin-style possessives ("the [X] of [Y]" possessive constructions) appeared at distinctly higher rates in pseudo-biblical texts than in either the King James Bible or the Book of Mormon: The American Revolution used the construction "over 400 times" per 10,000 words and The Late War "almost 400 times," while "the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon are at least half, or less than that amount."[18:7] Latin embellishments ("the engines of destruction" instead of "cannons") were a separate metric on which Snowden's The American Revolution registered 250 per 10,000 words and the Book of Mormon registered just 25 per 10,000 — about one-tenth the rate.[18:8]
| Feature | The American Revolution (Snowden) | The Late War (Hunt) | Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latin-style possessives per 10,000 words | over 400 | almost 400 | <200 (less than half) |
| Latin embellishments per 10,000 words | 250 | not reported | ~25 |
FBN, as a pseudo-biblical text in the same corpus as The Late War and The American Revolution, falls in the high-usage range, not the Book of Mormon's restrained range. Topical-phrase analysis tells the same story: phrases unique to The American Revolution comprised "over one third" of its content, but the same phrases represented "only about six or seven percent" of the Book of Mormon — roughly one-twentieth the rate.[18:9]
The conclusion Roper and Fields stated explicitly: "If Joseph Smith was 'influenced' by those books, his imitation of the King James style was better than theirs. Joseph Smith was either a literary genius, or a prophet, and we are all free to take our pick."[18:10]
FBN's stylistic register also diverges from the Book of Mormon's at the level of prose texture. The Heavy Metal Book of Mormon analysis cites a striking example: "His nightly path is lighted by fiery spectres, that sport and dance along the polar sky, and play amidst the wintry stars" (FBN 16:5).[7:10][3:4] The Book of Mormon contains no comparable passage. Its pseudo-biblical register is plainer — workmanlike imitation of King James Bible cadence, not the elaborate Romantic-era flourish Linning produces here. The two texts do not even imitate the King James Bible the same way.
Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (Oxford University Press, 2010), the most widely cited literary-academic treatment of the Book of Mormon as a literary artifact, similarly documents the Book of Mormon's distinct authorial voices, narrative restraint, and structural complexity — features that distinguish the Book of Mormon as a literary work from any single-author pseudo-biblical text in the genre.[31] Hardy is a non-apologist literary critic whose analytical interest is specifically in how the Book of Mormon functions as a narrative, and his treatment supports the broader observation: whatever the Book of Mormon is, it is not a typical instance of the pseudo-biblical genre.
Early Modern English Syntax: A Structural Test of the Genre Hypothesis
The most direct test of whether FBN influenced (or shares an authorial process with) the Book of Mormon is at the level of grammar rather than vocabulary. Vocabulary can be imitated consciously; deep syntactic patterns are unconsciously produced and are much harder to fake. Stanford Carmack's body of work — published across several articles in Interpreter — addresses exactly this question.[32][33][34][35]
Carmack's 2018 article, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?", is the load-bearing source for FBN specifically. The article analyzed nearly ten domains of syntax and morphosyntax in four pseudo-biblical authors in depth — John Leacock (1774–1775), Richard Snowden (1793), Michael Linning (1809), and Gilbert Hunt (1816) — comparing them against the King James Bible and the 1830 Book of Mormon, with reference to a broader corpus of approximately twenty-five pseudo-biblical works in the genre.[35:1] None of the four pseudo-biblical authors examined in depth — including the Glasgow-educated solicitor Linning — reproduced the Book of Mormon's deep grammatical patterns.
The syntactic features tested include: agentive of and by in passive constructions; lest–should and lest–shall syntax; the personal relative pronoun which used for human antecedents; periphrastic did affirmative declarative use; the more part phrase; pluperfect constructions like "had been spake"; the {-th} plural inflection; verbal complementation patterns after cause, command, desire, make, and suffer; the adjective desirous; and modal auxiliary variation in embedded clauses.[35:2]
The Linning-specific data is the strongest single positive-case data point in this article, because Linning is in Carmack's corpus by name:
| Feature | Book of Mormon | Linning (FBN) | KJV |
|---|---|---|---|
| Agentive of in passive constructions | ~46% | ~15% (4 of 27 regular verbs) | ~72% |
| Personal which (human antecedent) | ~52% | ~5% (2 instances) | ~12.5% |
| Periphrastic did (affirmative declarative) | High frequency | 1 example | High |
| {-th} plural inflection | Present | 2 questionable examples | Rare |
For the broader pseudo-biblical sample, Carmack reports: agentive of below 20% in Linning's Scottish text and below 10% in the American pseudo-biblical texts (vs. Book of Mormon 46% and KJV 72%); finite verbal complementation after cause of 0% across the pseudo-biblical texts (vs. Book of Mormon 57.6% and KJV 1.0%); finite verbal complementation after command of 25.7% across the pseudo-biblical texts (vs. Book of Mormon 77.2% and KJV 25.5%); finite verbal complementation after suffer of 6.9% across the pseudo-biblical texts (vs. Book of Mormon 62.6% and KJV 4.6%); and ditransitive constructions for cause (12 instances in the Book of Mormon, 0 across pseudo-biblical), command (99 vs. 1), and suffer (15 vs. 2).[35:3]
For the personal relative pronoun which domain — the feature most often cited by Carmack — the Book of Mormon "is uncorrelated with the King James Bible in this domain… negatively correlated with all four pseudo-biblical writings, usually strongly negatively correlated."[35:4] Carmack also reports that The Late War "correlates with the King James Bible at 0.32 and with the Book of Mormon at –0.96" on this domain — meaning the Book of Mormon's relative-pronoun usage is anti-correlated with the pseudo-biblical pattern. FBN follows the modern pseudo-biblical pattern, not the Book of Mormon's pattern.
The implication for the FBN claim is direct. The pseudo-biblicism hypothesis predicts that, if the Book of Mormon shares a literary genre with FBN, it should resemble FBN at the syntactic level — modern English with archaic vocabulary. Carmack's data shows the opposite. The Book of Mormon contains Early Modern English syntactic patterns that predate the King James Bible itself by more than a century, and these patterns are absent from the four pseudo-biblical texts examined in depth — including FBN, written by an educated Glasgow-trained solicitor over weeks or months with the benefit of a fair-copy manuscript. Carmack's 2015 article quantifies the divergence on command syntax alone: the Book of Mormon uses finite complementation after command in 79% of cases versus 19% in the King James Bible — a complete reversal, statistically significant at p < 10⁻²⁷.[32:1] This is not a difference of degree. It is a difference of kind, structurally predicting a different historical period of English than the one any pseudo-biblical imitator could have produced.
Worth Acknowledging
Carmack's broader Early Modern English thesis — that the Book of Mormon's overall language is best explained by translation from a pre-KJV source — is contested even within Latter-day Saint scholarship. Royal Skousen, whose Critical Text Project provides much of the data Carmack analyzes, has drawn more cautious conclusions about what EModE patterns mean for translation theory.
What this article relies on is the narrower claim: that pseudo-biblical English (Linning, Hunt, Snowden, Leacock) and Book of Mormon English are syntactically different, across multiple independent features, in ways no pseudo-biblical imitator reproduced. That narrower claim is well-supported by Carmack's published data and does not require accepting the full EModE-translation thesis. Whatever interpretation one prefers for what the Book of Mormon's archaic syntax means, the FBN-specific fact remains: Linning's syntax matches modern English with archaic vocabulary; the Book of Mormon's does not. The cultural-milieu hypothesis predicts the Book of Mormon should look syntactically like FBN. It does not.
No Evidence of Access
The CES Letter implies temporal access — "two early 19th century contemporary books written at least a decade before the Book of Mormon"[1:11] — without ever addressing geographic access. The temporal claim is technically correct: FBN was published in 1809, the Book of Mormon in 1830, twenty-one years separating them. The geographic claim is harder.
FBN was published in Edinburgh and sold by four British Isles booksellers — Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme of London; J.J. Stockdale of London; P. Hill of Edinburgh; and M. Keene of Dublin.[7:11] No American printer, publisher, distributor, or retailer appears in the imprint. AbeBooks listings, Goodreads, Google Books, and Internet Archive metadata all confirm a single 1809 Edinburgh/London printing.[11:1] The earliest American reprints in the bibliographic record are 21st-century print-on-demand editions from imprints like Leopold Classic Library and Forgotten Books — post-2010, not contemporary with Joseph Smith.[11:2]
The 1810 British Critic notice — the only major contemporary review of FBN that has been located — speaks directly to the access question. The review observed that the language adopted "would be peculiarly effective on the minds of those pious Christians, in humble life, who were accustomed to read and revere their Bibles," but that "the price at which a book so elegantly printed could be sold would prevent it from falling into the hands of such persons."[8:9] In other words: the most authoritative contemporary British reviewer reported that FBN was priced too elegantly to circulate even among ordinary Bible-reading Britons — let alone to cross the Atlantic and reach a teenage farm boy in upstate New York.
No American library catalog, bookshop inventory, or personal book list from before 1830 has been located that includes FBN. No American newspaper review or notice from the period has been located. No nineteenth-century critic of Joseph Smith — and there were many, actively searching for plagiarism sources during the 1830s and 1840s — ever named FBN. The 1834 Howe Mormonism Unvailed, the most comprehensive early anti-Mormon publication, does not mention it. Neither does Spalding-theory advocate Wesley Walters in his 1981 MA thesis on biblical use in the Book of Mormon.[36] FBN-as-Book-of-Mormon-source appears to originate with the Johnson 4-gram presentation in 2013 — 184 years after the Book of Mormon's publication.[8:10][11:3]
Joseph Smith was three to four years old when FBN was published in Edinburgh. He was twenty-three when he completed the translation of the Book of Mormon. The geographic gap is 4,000 miles; the publication languages are the same English; the access question is whether an expensive Scottish satirical pamphlet, priced beyond ordinary British readers, somehow crossed the Atlantic and reached the Smith household in Manchester, New York, between roughly 1820 and 1829, with no surviving documentation of any kind. The CES Letter does not argue this case. It does not need to argue it; the section is structured to leave the question of access entirely implicit, so that the reader is invited to draw the inference without ever being asked to defend it.
By contrast, The Late War — discussed in the sister Late War article — was published in New York City and adopted in some New York schools. Its access argument is significantly stronger than FBN's, even though the Late War article also concludes the textual evidence does not support borrowing. FBN's access argument is among the weakest of any proposed Book of Mormon source — weaker than The Late War, weaker than View of the Hebrews (which Ethan Smith published in Vermont in 1823 and which Oliver Cowdery's family did own a copy of), weaker than the Spalding manuscript theory.
Strongest Critical Arguments
The CES Letter's specific FBN argument — that the side-by-side demonstrates a textual relationship — does not survive the analysis above. But that argument is not the strongest version of the criticism. A serious academic critic would not defend it. The strongest version is the cultural-milieu argument: that the Book of Mormon's language, cadence, and narrative formulas were not unique but belonged to a recognizable, reproducible literary genre, and that the existence of FBN alongside The Late War, Snowden's American Revolution, Dodsley's Chronicle, and others demonstrates that "sounding scriptural" was a learnable cultural skill in the early nineteenth century, not evidence of divine translation. This article engages that version directly.
The Genre Was Real and Documented
The claim that pseudo-biblicism existed as a genre is on solid ground and should not be contested. Eran Shalev's three peer-reviewed publications make the case from the strongest possible academic platforms — Church History, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press.[5:6][4:4][6:2] Shalev catalogs over twenty pseudo-biblical texts from approximately 1740 to 1850, ranging from Dodsley's foundational Chronicle of the Kings of England (1740) to American Revolutionary-era pamphlets (Leacock 1774, Snowden 1793) to early-republic political satires (Linning 1809, Hunt 1816) to anti-tariff tracts (Book of Nullification, 1830s).[5:7] He treats this as a "unique and forgotten tradition" — the product of an age "still suffused with the Bible yet at the same time Enlightened as to the liberal use of that book's language."[4:5]
This is not a fringe claim. Shalev is published by Yale and Oxford. The genre's existence is established. Conceding the genre is not a problem for the faithful position; in fact, conceding it is essential to engaging the strongest version of the criticism honestly.
Multiple Authors Independently Produced the Style
Shalev's catalog shows that pseudo-biblical writing was reproducible — a learnable cultural skill, not a unique gift. Linning was a Glasgow-educated solicitor; Hunt was an American author of educational texts; Snowden produced school materials; Leacock was a Revolutionary-era pamphleteer; Dodsley was a British playwright. None of them was a prophet. None claimed divine translation. They all reached for the King James Bible register because that register was culturally available and rhetorically effective for political and educational purposes.[5:8][4:6]
If pseudo-biblical writing was a reproducible cultural form, the Book of Mormon's pseudo-biblical register cannot be taken, by itself, as evidence of supernatural origin. This is an honest concession. The faithful argument has sometimes overreached on stylistic grounds — claiming the Book of Mormon's style is uniquely "scriptural-sounding" in a way that defies natural explanation. The genre data falsifies that overreach. Pseudo-biblical English was reproducible. The Book of Mormon's stylistic register, in itself, is evidence of cultural location, not divine origin. The contest is over what else the Book of Mormon contains beyond its register.
The Cumulative Cultural-Milieu Case
The most rhetorically effective version of the criticism is not "Joseph Smith plagiarized FBN" but rather:
"The Book of Mormon shares stylistic features with FBN. It shares thematic elements with View of the Hebrews. It shares phrase-level vocabulary with The Late War. It shares motifs with Dodsley's Chronicle. The Smith family lived in proximity to settings where each of these texts (or texts like them) circulated. No single source explains the Book of Mormon, but the cumulative pattern — a young man embedded in a saturated pseudo-biblical, millenarian, restorationist, anti-Catholic, mound-builder cultural environment — explains why a young farmer with limited formal education could produce a text recombining culturally-available elements into a new but recognizable work."
Versions of this argument appear in Dan Vogel's Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (2004)[37] and in Brent Metcalfe's edited volume New Approaches to the Book of Mormon (1993).[38] Richard Bushman's Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (2005), the standard non-apologist biography of Joseph Smith, also surveys the cultural environment without committing to specific source-text dependencies.[39] These are not fringe critiques; they are the serious academic version of the cultural-context argument.
The cumulative version has rhetorical advantages over the single-source version. It does not require proving Joseph Smith read any specific book. It does not require any specific text to be a literal source. It is harder to refute than direct dependence because no specific source can be ruled in or out — the cumulative pattern is supposed to outweigh any specific refutation. And it is genuinely plausible at the level of cultural environment: nineteenth-century American religious culture was saturated with biblical language, prophetic-style writing, restorationist theology, and Native-Americans-as-lost-tribes speculation.[4:7]
Shalev's Own Caveat
Critically, Shalev himself does not take his cultural-milieu thesis as far as the CES Letter implies. He distinguishes between reception (how readers received the Book of Mormon) and production (how the Book of Mormon was written), and his argument is reception-conditioning, not production-source. From American Zion: "These books often helped sanctify American experience by self-consciously biblicizing it. By conditioning contemporaries to applying biblical language to American content, and thus to perceive their history and construct their national experience in scriptural categories, the pseudo-biblical language may have helped to ameliorate readers' reactions to and digestion of the Mormon Bible."[4:8]
Shalev's caveat is striking: "assessing the assertion that pseudo-biblicism had actually participated in and contributed to the reception of the Book of Mormon is a daunting, not to say a futile task," and "no direct ties connecting the Book of Mormon to pseudo-biblicism" exist in the documentary record.[4:9][6:3] The most academically credentialed advocate of the cultural-context view explicitly distinguishes between reception (which his thesis addresses) and production (which his thesis does not address). The CES Letter conflates the two; Shalev does not.
The faithful response can fully grant Shalev's reception thesis while rejecting any production thesis (which Shalev himself does not advance). Pseudo-biblicism may well have conditioned how Joseph Smith's contemporaries received the Book of Mormon. That has nothing to do with whether the Book of Mormon's content, structure, syntax, and production circumstances can be naturalistically explained as a pseudo-biblical text.
Where Even the Steelman Falls Short
The cultural-milieu argument, even at its strongest, has problems it cannot resolve.
The genre proves too much. If pseudo-biblicism was a widespread convention used by twenty-plus authors over ninety years, then any text written in King James Bible style will share vocabulary with the Book of Mormon — and with every other pseudo-biblical text. This is exactly what the data shows. FBN shares KJV phrases with the Book of Mormon for the same reason it shares KJV phrases with The Late War, with Snowden's American Revolution, with Dodsley's Chronicle, and with The Book of Nullification: all five drew from the same well. The genre explains the shared vocabulary completely. What the genre cannot explain is why the Book of Mormon alone — out of all these texts — contains complex theology, internally consistent geography across 150+ place names, distinct authorial voices, Hebraisms absent from the King James Bible, and grammatical structures older than the King James Bible itself. The genre explains the surface; it does not explain the substance.
Surface similarity without deep similarity. The parallels between FBN and the Book of Mormon are exclusively at the vocabulary and phrase level. No narrative, theological, character, structural, or geographic parallel exists between the two books. The cultural-milieu argument cannot explain why the Book of Mormon shares words with FBN but nothing else — unless the answer is "genre convention," which explains the similarity so completely that it ceases to be evidence for anything beyond genre membership.[20:1]
The grammar diverges where the theory predicts convergence. The cultural-milieu hypothesis makes a testable prediction: if the Book of Mormon's language comes from the same literary tradition as FBN, it should resemble FBN at the grammatical level. Carmack's data shows it does not.[35:5] The Book of Mormon contains Early Modern English features absent from FBN, The Late War, Snowden's American Revolution, and Leacock's American Chronicles. Whatever interpretation one prefers for what those EModE features ultimately mean, the narrower fact stands: pseudo-biblical syntax and Book of Mormon syntax are different, across multiple independent features, in ways the genre theory predicts they should not be.
The cumulative case shows the method is unreliable. The proliferation of proposed source texts — FBN, The Late War, View of the Hebrews, Solomon Spalding, Snowden, Dodsley, Late Ancient History, eventually Leaves of Grass in Lindsay's reductio — does not strengthen the cumulative argument. It demonstrates that the parallel-finding method generates "hits" with almost any text from the period or even from later periods.[24:1] When a diagnostic test returns positive for every patient, the problem is with the test, not with the patients.
The cultural-milieu argument fails its own predictions. If Joseph Smith was a young farmer absorbing pseudo-biblical conventions from a saturated cultural environment, the Book of Mormon should be a 22,500-word satirical pamphlet about contemporary American politics with biblical-style cadence — i.e., it should look like FBN. Instead, the Book of Mormon is a 269,510-word religious scripture with sustained covenant theology, internally consistent ancient geography, distinct authorial voices, confirmed ancient toponyms in Yemen, chiastic structures characteristic of ancient Hebrew literature, Hebrew syntactic patterns absent from English, and grammatical structures predating the King James Bible. The cultural-milieu hypothesis explains the surface register. It does not generate the structure, content, or production circumstances. The hypothesis is descriptively interesting and predictively empty.
Evidence Supporting the Book of Mormon
The cultural-milieu case is the strongest version of the criticism, and the question this section answers is the question that version raises: given that pseudo-biblicism was a documented genre, what features of the Book of Mormon does the genre nonetheless fail to reproduce? The five pillars below are organized as direct responses to that question. They are deliberately FBN-relevant — FBN-specific data points are surfaced where they exist. Several of these features are developed more fully in canonical articles elsewhere on this site; the relevant cross-links are noted.
A Note on Sourcing
The structural-evidence case below relies heavily on Latter-day Saint scholars publishing in faith-affirming venues — Stanford Carmack, Royal Skousen, and others in Interpreter; Matthew Roper, Paul J. Fields, and G. Bruce Schaalje at FAIR Conference and BYU journals; John W. Welch in BYU Studies Quarterly; Wayne Larsen, Alvin Rencher, and Tim Layton in BYU Studies; John A. Tvedtnes in FARMS publications; Donald W. Parry in BYU RSC; Warren Aston in BYU Studies Quarterly; John L. Sorenson in Maxwell Institute publications. This is a real epistemic limitation a reader should weigh, and this article does not pretend the situation is otherwise. The underlying primary numbers — Carmack's syntactic counts, Roper-Fields's possessive ratios, Welch's chiasmus structure, Aston's altar-inscription data — are independently verifiable from the published Book of Mormon, FBN, and primary archaeological reports, and a non-Latter-day Saint linguist or archaeologist could in principle audit them. The methodological substance is what does the work; the institutional affiliations of the scholars matter less than whether their counts and analyses replicate.
A. What the Genre Cannot Reproduce
A.1 — Carmack's Syntactic Test (the single strongest FBN-specific data point)
The pseudo-biblicism hypothesis predicts that, if the Book of Mormon shares a literary genre with FBN, it should resemble FBN at the syntactic level. Carmack's 2018 study tested this prediction directly, with FBN as a corpus member by name.[35:6] The Linning-specific frequency table is shown above in the Early Modern English Syntax analysis; the headline result is that across nearly ten domains of syntax and morphosyntax, none of the four pseudo-biblical authors examined in depth — Leacock, Snowden, Linning (FBN), Hunt — reproduced the Book of Mormon's grammatical patterns. Carmack's overall conclusion: "No pseudo-biblical author came close to what is found in the Book of Mormon." And on the personal which domain specifically: the Book of Mormon "is uncorrelated with the King James Bible in this domain… negatively correlated with all four pseudo-biblical writings, usually strongly negatively correlated."[35:7]
The Linning-specific facts bear repeating because they are the single most powerful data point in this article: Linning was a Glasgow-educated solicitor whose text went through editorial reconsideration via a fair-copy manuscript before publication, and the published text still did not contain these patterns. He produced ~5% personal which (vs. Book of Mormon ~52%), ~15% agentive of (vs. ~46%), one example of periphrastic did, and two questionable {-th} plurals. Carmack's 2015 article on command syntax adds quantification: the Book of Mormon uses finite complementation after command in 79% of cases versus 19% in the King James Bible, a complete reversal that is statistically significant at p < 10⁻²⁷.[32:2] The Book of Mormon's command-syntax pattern matches William Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend more closely than it matches the 1611 King James Bible — across nearly twenty distinct esoteric usage rates, despite a 346-year publication gap. Carmack's conclusion: "All the evidence indicates that Joseph Smith would not have produced the structures found in the text using the King James Bible as a model, nor from his own language."[32:3]
A separate Carmack study (2017) attacks the Joseph-as-author hypothesis from a different angle. Carmack analyzed Joseph Smith's own 1832 history and reports that Joseph's own grammar uses periphrastic did in affirmative declarative constructions at 0%, while the Book of Mormon uses it at high frequency. Joseph's own English does not, as a documented matter, reproduce the Book of Mormon's English.[34:1] This finding does not by itself prove a non-Joseph-Smith authorship — a critic can argue that the Book of Mormon's syntactic register was a deliberate stylistic choice Joseph made for the dictation that he did not maintain in his personal writing — but the brute fact that Joseph's own words and the Book of Mormon's words are syntactically distinguishable is the kind of fact a "Joseph composed it" hypothesis must account for.
The canonical home for the broader EModE discussion is the Late War article and a likely future translation-method article. For this article, the FBN-specific data is the load-bearing point.
A.2 — Roper-Fields Quantitative Stylistic Test
Where Carmack tests deep syntax, Roper and Fields tested surface KJV style quantitatively across four dimensions, with FBN explicitly in the comparison set.[18:11] The four dimensions and their findings are documented in the analysis section above. The Latin-feature data is decisive for the FBN claim and bears restating here: The American Revolution used Latin-style possessives "over 400 times" per 10,000 words and The Late War "almost 400 times," while "the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon are at least half, or less than that amount."[18:12] On Latin embellishments, The American Revolution registered 250 per 10,000 words against the Book of Mormon's ~25 per 10,000 words — roughly one-tenth the rate.[18:13] FBN, as a pseudo-biblical text in the same family as Hunt and Snowden, falls in the high-usage category on both metrics, not the Book of Mormon's restrained pattern.[18:14]
This pattern is the opposite of what the borrowing hypothesis predicts. If the Book of Mormon were a pseudo-biblical text, it should cluster with FBN against the King James Bible. Instead, it clusters with the King James Bible against FBN. Either Joseph Smith was a far better KJV imitator than Linning the Glasgow solicitor (and Hunt and Snowden), or the Book of Mormon is not a pseudo-biblical text in the same family as Linning's pamphlet.[18:15]
A.3 — Hebraisms Absent from the King James Bible
The pseudo-biblicism hypothesis explains FBN-Book-of-Mormon overlap as shared King James Bible imitation. That explanation works if every shared feature traces to the King James Bible. The Book of Mormon contains Hebrew-style features that do not appear in the King James Bible at all — features that cannot be explained by either source-borrowing or genre imitation.
The strongest single case is the if/and conditional construction. In the original 1830 Book of Mormon, conditional sentences sometimes use the Hebrew-style structure: "If [protasis], and [apodosis]" — where Hebrew uses waw (and) to introduce the consequence of a conditional, but English does not. The construction is ungrammatical in standard English, and the King James translators always converted it to standard English form. The Book of Mormon, as originally dictated, did not.[40]
Donald W. Parry has documented approximately fourteen examples of this construction in the original text.[40:1] An example from Helaman 12 (original 1830 text reconstructed by Royal Skousen): "yea, if the Lord shall say unto a man… it is done… yea, and if he saith unto the earth: thou shalt go back, that it lengthen out the day for many hours, and it is done."[40:2] Joseph Smith and his 1837 editors corrected most of these to standard English — exactly because the if/and pattern looks ungrammatical in English. Their original presence in 1830, and their distribution in clusters, is the kind of fingerprint that rules out conscious imitation: nobody imitating the King James Bible would invent a feature the King James Bible doesn't have, then have to "correct" it later.
This argument is decisive against pseudo-biblicism specifically. Pseudo-biblical authors imitate the King James Bible. The Book of Mormon contains a Hebraism the King James Bible does not contain. That Hebraism has no plausible source in any 19th-century pseudo-biblical text and no plausible source in the King James Bible itself.
Other Hebraisms in cluster: cognate accusatives ("I have dreamed a dream," 1 Nephi 8:2; "curse them even with a sore curse," 1 Nephi 2:23); construct-state noun chains ("plates of brass," "rod of iron," "altar of stones," "chains of hell," "mist of darkness" — Parry: the Hebrew-style construct equivalent "occurs about three hundred times" in the Book of Mormon, compared to only twice for English-style possessive "Lord's"); repeated possessive pronouns ("your wicked ways; and repent of your evil doings, of your lyings and deceivings," 3 Nephi 30:2); adverbial phrases instead of adverbs ("with harshness," "with joy," "exceeding great joy"); and singular verb with grammatically singular plural-meaning Hebrew nouns ("this people is," Alma 30:24–25, reflecting Hebrew ʿam).[40:3]
The phrase "and it came to pass" deserves separate attention. It appears approximately 727 times in the King James Bible — about 0.93 occurrences per 1,000 words across the KJV's roughly 783,000 words — where it translates the Hebrew narrative formula wayehi.[27:2] In the original 1830 Book of Mormon, it appears approximately 1,494 times across roughly 269,510 words — about 5.5 per 1,000 words, roughly six times the KJV rate.[27:3] By contrast, pseudo-biblical writers (Linning included) sprinkle "it came to pass" as decorative archaism without anywhere approaching the Book of Mormon's structural frequency. The Book of Mormon's rate is dramatically higher than any pseudo-biblical comparator's, which is the relevant point for the FBN claim regardless of which interpretation one prefers for the Book of Mormon's elevated frequency itself.
The canonical home for the full Hebraisms discussion is the eventual translation-method article. For this article, the if/and case is the load-bearing point because it specifically rules out pseudo-biblical/KJV imitation as a complete explanation.
B. What FBN Cannot Have
B.1 — Confirmed Ancient Names: Nahom
The Book of Mormon describes Lehi's family naming a burial site Nahom in the Arabian wilderness as they journeyed from Jerusalem (1 Nephi 16:34). In 1988, three limestone altars were excavated at the Bar'an temple near Marib, Yemen, bearing the South Arabian inscription NHM identifying a tribal name.[41] The altars themselves date to roughly 800–700 BC; the tribal reference within the inscription — Naw'um of the Nihm tribe, grandfather of the donor Bi'athtar — predates the altars by approximately fifty years, placing the Nihm tribe's existence in roughly 850–750 BC.[41:1] This places NHM as an attested tribal name in the Arabian Peninsula at exactly the period (seventh-to-eighth century BC) Lehi's family allegedly traveled there.
The geographic match is also tight. The Nihm tribal area lies in the mountains northeast of Sana'a in Yemen. Eastward from there is "the only fertile area in over a thousand miles of coastline" in southern Oman — corresponding to the Book of Mormon's description of turning "nearly eastward" from Nahom to the place they called Bountiful (1 Nephi 17:1).[41:2] Latter-day Saint scholar Terryl Givens has called the discovery "the first actual archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon."
Critics raise legitimate questions about NHM. The South Arabian script omits vowels; "NHM" represents only the consonants and could vocalize as Naham, Nehem, Nihm, or Nahom. NHM is also a relatively common Semitic root (related to "comfort/console"). These objections have substance at the phonetic level. The harder question critics have not answered is the geographic specificity: how did Joseph Smith place a real ancient toponym at the right point along a real ancient trade route, in a real region eastward from which actually lies a fertile Arabian coast — none of which any American in 1829 could have known about? The phonetic question is debatable; the geographic specificity is harder to wave away.
For this article, the contrast with FBN is direct. FBN cannot have ancient name confirmations because it is about contemporary Napoleon — its proper names are real European places anyone with a map could verify. The Book of Mormon's geography includes places no nineteenth-century American knew, with names that subsequent archaeology has confirmed as authentic ancient Semitic. The pseudo-biblical genre cannot generate this. It is not the kind of thing the genre even attempts.
Beyond Nahom, several other Book of Mormon proper names have plausible ancient Semitic etymologies confirmed since 1830. The name Alma as a male personal name was confirmed by the Bar Kokhba letters from the Cave of Letters expedition in the early 1960s — Yigael Yadin's 1962 publication identified "Alma ben Yehudah" as a Jewish male name from the second century AD.[42] Joseph Smith was mocked in his own lifetime for using "Alma" as a male name in the Book of Mormon, since "Alma" sounds Latinate-feminine in English; the Bar Kokhba discovery — published more than 130 years after the Book of Mormon — vindicated the usage as authentically Hebraic. (The anachronisms article surveys Alma alongside other items independently confirmed since 1830 — barley, pre-Columbian steel, curved swords, and others.) The Book of Mormon contains 337 distinct proper names, of which approximately 188 are unique to the Book of Mormon and 149 are common with the Bible, providing a far broader test corpus for ancient-name attestation than FBN's small set of European proper nouns.[14:1]
The canonical home for the full NHM discussion is the archaeology article. For this article, NHM is one of several specific data points the genre cannot produce.
B.2 — Internally Consistent Geography Across 150+ Place Names
John L. Sorenson, in Mormon's Codex (Deseret Book / Maxwell Institute, 2013), documented that the Book of Mormon's roughly 150 place names form a coherent internal spatial system across approximately 1,000 narrative years.[15:1] The Limited Geography Model has survived rigorous textual cross-checking despite never being tied to any specific modern map. Locations described as "north," "south," "east," and "west" of one another remain consistent across hundreds of independent textual references in different chapters, by different internal authors, written across centuries within the narrative.
This is not what pseudo-biblical writing produces. FBN's geography is real Europe — no internal consistency challenge exists, because anyone with a map could check the locations. The Book of Mormon describes a fictional internal geography that is consistent with itself across 269,510 words. Generating that kind of internal coherence requires either (a) a real underlying historical text or (b) extraordinary compositional control — which is precisely what dictation in roughly sixty working days does not afford.
The canonical home for geography discussion is the geography article (with related archaeological evidence in the archaeology article). For this article, internal-geographic consistency is one more feature pseudo-biblicism does not generate.
B.3 — Extended Chiastic Structures
The Book of Mormon contains extended chiastic structures characteristic of ancient Hebrew literature — most famously Alma 36, a 19-element chiasmus where the central element ("And it came to pass that as I was thus racked with torment… I remembered also to have heard my father prophesy unto our fathers concerning the coming of one Jesus Christ") is the structural and thematic pivot.[43] John W. Welch first identified chiasmus throughout the Book of Mormon in August 1967 while serving as a missionary in Regensburg, Germany. He documented the discovery in a letter to Robert K. Thomas dated August 18, 1967 — primary-source documentation of the discovery within days of its occurrence.[44] He published the finding in BYU Studies in 1969.[43:1]
Chiasmus is a Hebrew literary form, attested in the Old Testament and ancient Near Eastern literature broadly. As Welch notes, no comprehensive scholarly understanding of chiasmus as a Hebrew literary device existed in America in 1830 — some knowledge of Hebrew parallelism existed via John Jebb (1820) and Thomas Boys (1825) in England, but the systematic recognition came later, particularly with Nils Lund's Chiasmus in the New Testament in 1942.[43:2] A 23-year-old farmer in upstate New York could not plausibly have constructed Alma 36 from cultural availability of chiastic literary technique; the technique was not yet culturally available in Joseph Smith's environment in any developed form.
Critics correctly note that chiasmus can be found in many texts, including unintentional structural symmetries that appear in any sufficiently long work. Earl Wunderli's An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself (2013) contests Welch's methodology directly, and Welch and his collaborators have responded with statistical models and tighter selection criteria; the methodological debate is genuinely contested rather than settled.[45] The narrower point that matters for the FBN claim is that none of the four pseudo-biblical comparators — Linning, Hunt, Snowden, Leacock — contains an extended chiastic structure of any kind. FBN, in particular, is a linear chronicle, not a Hebrew-style literary composition. Whatever Alma 36 ultimately is, it is not what the pseudo-biblical genre produces.
The canonical home for chiasmus discussion is the KJV errors article and likely future treatments. For this article, chiasmus is one more feature pseudo-biblicism does not generate.
B.4 — Distinguishable Authorial Voices
Larsen, Rencher, and Layton (1980, BYU Studies) used wordprint analysis — frequency patterns of common function words, the kind of stylistic fingerprint authors cannot consciously control — to test the Book of Mormon's authorship.[46] They identified multiple statistically distinct authorial wordprints consistent with the named authors of internal text sections. John L. Hilton (1990, BYU Studies) replicated the result with an independent methodology.[47]
Roper, Fields, and Schaalje (2012, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies) extended the analysis with discriminant analysis and the extended nearest shrunken centroid (ENSC) method, finding "the Book of Mormon's four main authors can easily be distinguished between each other."[16:1][18:16] The methodology does not pre-identify the authors; the clusters emerge from the text itself. The principal voices that emerge correspond to Nephi, Jacob, Mormon, and Moroni — the named internal authors. Up to twenty-three distinct speakers can be detected at finer resolution.[16:2] The candidate nineteenth-century authors — Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt — all fail to match any Book of Mormon authorial signature.
Critics have pushed back. Jockers, Witten, and Criddle (2008) attempted to attribute Book of Mormon authorship to a Rigdon-Spalding combination using closed-set classification.[16:3] Schaalje and others have shown the closed-set methodology is invalid for problems where the true author may not be in the candidate pool; the open-set ENSC method gets different results, and closed-set Spalding-Rigdon attribution cannot survive open-set testing.[16:4] The narrower claim the data supports — that statistically distinguishable patterns exist within the Book of Mormon, consistent with multiple authorial voices — is well-grounded.
The implication for FBN is direct: multiple distinct authorial voices is what we would expect from a translation of a multi-author ancient record. It is not what we would expect from Joseph Smith composing in imitation of pseudo-biblical texts. Linning wrote in one voice. FBN is single-author by definition. The Book of Mormon is not.
C. The Production Circumstance
C.1 — Roughly 60 Working Days, Roughly 269,510 Words, No Notes, No Revisions
John W. Welch's 2018 study, "Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon," calculated that the translation occupied between 57 and 63 actual working days — April 7 to June 30, 1829 — producing approximately 269,510 words across 608 manuscript pages.[13:2] Welch's experimental data: dictation at roughly 20 words per minute is "quite possible" for short bursts, but sustaining that rate "hour after hour, day after day" is very challenging. Welch noted that Joseph had no time for "research, for collocating scattered scriptural phrases, for keeping track of numerous threads."[13:3]
The manuscript evidence — Royal Skousen's Critical Text Project — is unambiguous on the central fact: "There are very few signs of any editing or Joseph changing his mind about the translation."[13:4] The 28% of the original manuscript that survives, plus the complete printer's manuscript, shows a pattern of dictation in which Joseph Smith was reading words rather than composing or paraphrasing. Spellings of unfamiliar names are consistent across the manuscript even when the same name occurs hundreds of pages apart. There is no drafting, no marginalia indicating second thoughts, no false starts on theological points. The scribe wrote, Joseph corrected when the spelling was wrong — a pattern consistent with reading a fixed text, not composing.[48][49]
Eyewitness accounts are consistent and survive disaffection. Oliver Cowdery, the primary scribe: "with the exception of a few pages, I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon… as it fell from the lips of the Prophet."[13:5] Emma Smith: Joseph could "begin where he had left off" after interruptions without re-reading; he had no manuscript or notes.[50] David Whitmer: estimated his portion of the translation work at his father's home "occupied about one month, that is, from June 1st to July 1st, 1829."[13:6][51] Several of these witnesses gave their accounts after disaffection from the Church — they had every incentive to expose fraud and did not.
C.2 — The Contrast with Linning
Michael Linning, by contrast, was a Scottish writer educated at Glasgow College who:[8:11][7:12]
- Wrote The First Book of Napoleon — approximately 22,500 words — with whatever compositional resources weeks or months of revision allowed;
- Had a pre-publication fair-copy manuscript prepared by Sir T.L. Mitchell at Peggy's Mill in 1809 (per the State Library of New South Wales) — meaning the text we have went through at least one round of editorial reconsideration before publication;
- Was a single author working on a small political-satirical text for British Isles readers;
- Yet still produced only 5% personal which (vs. Book of Mormon's 52%), 15% agentive of (vs. 46%), and a text Roper and Fields' data shows is far less King-James-Bible-like than the Book of Mormon across every dimension they measured.[35:8][18:17]
Linning was not trying to produce Book of Mormon syntax — he was satirizing Napoleon, and the pseudo-biblical genre was for him a rhetorical mode rather than a target style.[52] The argument's force operates at the genre level: across the four pseudo-biblical authors Carmack analyzed in depth, none of them — regardless of education, revision opportunity, or compositional purpose — produced the Book of Mormon's syntactic profile. Joseph Smith dictated approximately twelve times more text in roughly sixty days, with no draft, no notes, no revision opportunity, and no opportunity to consult a King James Bible concordance for the consistent Hebraisms — yet produced a text that outperforms FBN on King James Bible-style metrics, contains Early Modern English syntactic features absent from FBN and the other three pseudo-biblical comparators, contains Hebraisms the King James Bible does not have, internally maintains 337 named characters and 150+ place names without contradiction across 269,510 words, and matches an ancient toponym (Nahom) at the right location in Arabia.
The point is not that Joseph and Linning were attempting the same task. The point is that the pseudo-biblicism hypothesis predicts the Book of Mormon should belong to the same family of texts as FBN, The Late War, Snowden's American Revolution, and Leacock's American Chronicles. By every measurable dimension — syntactic, stylometric, structural, geographic, theological, production-circumstance — it does not. The hypothesis fails its own predictions.
C.3 — No Whistleblower (Scope-Limited)
Multiple eyewitnesses to the translation process — Emma Smith, Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, the Whitmer family — gave consistent accounts of the dictation method across decades. Several gave their accounts after disaffection from the Church, when they had no remaining loyalty motive. None ever said "I saw him with a copy of The First Book of Napoleon" or "I saw him with notes" or "I saw him studying View of the Hebrews."
The reach of this argument is real but bounded. Against the direct-dependence version of the criticism (what the CES Letter's side-by-side implies), the whistleblower argument has force: if Joseph had been consulting source texts during the 1829 dictation in the presence of multiple witnesses, the scenario depends on those witnesses choosing silence across decades and through public disaffection. Against the cultural-milieu version, this argument has no force, because that version requires only that pseudo-biblical conventions were absorbed in Joseph's pre-1829 environment, with no 1829 source-text for a scribe to whistleblow on.[53] A faithful response to the cultural-milieu version has to engage on the textual merits, which is what §A.1 (Carmack syntax), §A.2 (Roper-Fields stylometry), §A.3 (Hebraisms absent from KJV), and §B.1 (Nahom) do.
The honest position: the no-whistleblower point is one strike against the direct-dependence version of the criticism and zero strikes against the cultural-milieu version. The canonical home for the witnesses discussion is the witnesses section.
D. The Anchor
When the granular debates exhaust the reader, what stands firm is the comparison itself. The First Book of Napoleon is a 22,500-word satirical pamphlet about Napoleon Bonaparte, written by an educated Glasgow-trained solicitor over weeks or months, published in Edinburgh for a British audience that, contemporary reviewers reported, found it priced beyond ordinary readership, and never documented to have crossed the Atlantic before the Book of Mormon's publication. It contains no theology, no internally consistent fictional geography, no chiastic structures, no Hebrew syntactic patterns absent from the King James Bible, no confirmed ancient toponyms, no distinguishable authorial voices, no Early Modern English syntax Linning's own period had abandoned. It is what its genre produces.
The Book of Mormon is approximately 269,510 words of religious scripture, dictated orally in roughly sixty working days by a 23-year-old with limited formal education, with no notes, no outline, and no substantive revisions. It contains sustained covenant theology centered on Jesus Christ, internally consistent geography across 150+ place names spanning a thousand narrative years, distinct statistically distinguishable authorial voices, Hebraisms absent from the King James Bible (most decisively the if/and conditional construction), an ancient Yemeni toponym (Nahom) at the geographically correct location, chiastic structures characteristic of ancient Hebrew literature (Welch's 1969 discovery, further developed elsewhere), and Early Modern English syntactic patterns predating the King James Bible by more than a century. It has multiple incentivized eyewitnesses to its production who never recanted their accounts of the dictation, including witnesses who left the Church.
These two artifacts cannot be members of the same genre in any sense that the cultural-milieu hypothesis predicts. They share a stylistic register — both imitate King James Bible English — and that shared register is fully explained by the well-documented pseudo-biblical genre Shalev describes. Beyond the register, they share nothing. The genre explains the surface; nothing else explains the substance.
The CES Letter's section on FBN, taken on its own terms, presents a side-by-side comparison whose construction relies on a bracketed-word insertion that does not appear in either source, a chapter-summary phrase quoted as if it were body text, an antonym, ellipses across twenty-five pages, and a methodological technique (parallelomania) recognized as defective for over six decades. The strongest version of the criticism (the cultural-milieu argument) is a real argument and deserves engagement, but its own most credentialed advocate (Shalev) explicitly distinguishes between reception-conditioning (which his thesis advances) and production-source (which his thesis explicitly does not advance).[6:4] What is left is a comparison between an obscure Scottish satire and a religious scripture that, on every dimension where the comparison can be made, points in different directions.
Further Reading
- Scripture Central KnoWhy #502: "Is the Book of Mormon Like Any Other Nineteenth-Century Book?" — short overview of why the Book of Mormon is not explainable as a product of its literary era.
- The sister parallel-text articles on this site: View of the Hebrews and The Late War.
- For the Book of Mormon's positive case in greater depth, see archaeology, DNA, anachronisms, and KJV errors.
Assessment
The CES Letter's First Book of Napoleon claim is the weakest of the three parallel-text claims in the Book of Mormon section. The side-by-side comparison — the centerpiece of the argument — harvests twelve common King James Bible phrases from twenty-five scattered pages of Linning's source material, stitches them together with twelve sets of ellipses, inserts a bracketed "(writing)" that does not appear in either source as the comparison frames it, quotes a chapter-summary recap from FBN's table of contents as if it were body text (the underlying narrative verse uses a structurally different coordinate clause, "wickedness and perverseness"), and includes an antonym ("small in stature" vs. "large in stature") as a "similarity." Every shared phrase, without exception, traces not to The First Book of Napoleon but to the King James Bible — a source both texts independently imitate. The comparison-construction technique is recognized in biblical scholarship as parallelomania, a methodological error documented since 1962 and applicable to virtually any two English texts of sufficient length.
The Johnson 4-gram study, the only quantitative evidence ever offered for any FBN-Book-of-Mormon relationship, scored FBN at 0.06 on the Uniform Match Score — four times lower than the Book of Mormon's own score against The Late War and more than six times lower than The Book of Nullification's score against The Late War. The methodology behind that study has been subjected to detailed peer-reviewed critique exposing five fundamental flaws, and a Bayesian analysis of the data concluded that influence is statistically unlikely even for the higher-scoring Late War. For FBN specifically, the conclusion follows with even greater force.
The two books share no content of any kind. The First Book of Napoleon is a 22,500-word Scottish satirical pamphlet about Napoleon Bonaparte and the French Revolution, published in Edinburgh in 1809 for a British Isles audience, priced beyond ordinary British readership according to the only major contemporary review located, and never documented to have crossed the Atlantic before 1830. The Book of Mormon is a 269,510-word religious scripture about a thousand-year ancient American civilization, centered on Jesus Christ. The two share a stylistic register — imitation King James Bible English — which is explained entirely by the well-documented pseudo-biblical genre that produced over twenty texts between approximately 1740 and 1850.
The strongest version of the criticism — Shalev's cultural-milieu argument — is the version a serious academic critic would defend, and it deserves the engagement this article has tried to provide. Shalev's thesis is real scholarship published by Yale University Press and Oxford University Press. The pseudo-biblical genre was a documented cultural form. Pseudo-biblical writing was reproducible. Joseph Smith was embedded in a culture saturated with biblical language and prophetic-style writing. These are honest concessions and the faithful argument should make them.
But the cultural-milieu argument, properly understood, explains the Book of Mormon's stylistic register so completely that the register ceases to be evidence for anything beyond genre membership. And at the level where genre conventions end and textual distinctiveness begins, the Book of Mormon diverges sharply from every pseudo-biblical text examined. Stanford Carmack's 2018 study documented this divergence directly, with FBN as a corpus member: across nearly ten domains of syntax and morphosyntax, none of the four pseudo-biblical authors examined in depth — including the Glasgow-educated solicitor Linning — reproduced the Book of Mormon's grammatical patterns. Linning, with better formal education than Joseph Smith and with weeks or months of compositional time on a short text, produced 5% personal which and 15% agentive of, against the Book of Mormon's 52% and 46%. Roper and Fields' 2014 stylometric analysis showed that the Book of Mormon is more King James Bible-like than FBN across every measurable dimension — the opposite of what the borrowing thesis predicts. The original 1830 Book of Mormon contains the Hebrew if/and conditional construction approximately fourteen times in cluster — a pattern absent from the King James Bible, ungrammatical in English, present nowhere in any pseudo-biblical text, corrected out by Joseph and his 1837 editors. The Book of Mormon's geography places Nahom at the geographically correct location in Arabia. Multiple statistically distinguishable authorial voices emerge from open-set stylometric analysis. None of these features is what the cultural-milieu hypothesis predicts a pseudo-biblical Book of Mormon should contain.
Shalev's own caveat is the strongest answer to the cultural-milieu argument. The most academically credentialed advocate of the cultural-context view explicitly concedes that "no direct ties connecting the Book of Mormon to pseudo-biblicism" exist in the documentary record, and that his thesis addresses how readers received the Book of Mormon, not how it was written.[4:10][6:5] The CES Letter conflates reception with production. Shalev does not.
The genre of pseudo-biblical writing tells us something real about the early American literary environment, and the Book of Mormon shares its surface stylistic register. The genre does not tell us where the Book of Mormon came from. The First Book of Napoleon is one obscure Scottish satire among twenty-plus pseudo-biblical texts; the Book of Mormon is a 269,510-word religious scripture with content, structure, syntax, and production circumstances that no pseudo-biblical text comes close to reproducing. The CES Letter's section produces a strong first impression by selecting the right twelve phrases out of one-sixth of Linning's book. The first impression dissolves on examination. What stands when it does is the Book of Mormon itself — a 60-day dictation containing Arabian geography Joseph could not have known, Hebrew syntactic patterns the KJV does not contain, and grammar from a century before any English Bible the Smith family could have owned. The First Book of Napoleon question is bounded; the Book of Mormon's existence as a coherent 269,510-word text dictated in roughly sixty days, witnessed by people who maintained their accounts to the end of their lives, is not.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 10, pp. 24–25. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"FBN Excerpt Comparison," Debunking the CES Letter. The Napoleon-side phrases are drawn from pages i, ii, iii, v, 9, 10, 12, 17, 19, 21, and 25 — spanning the title page, the table of contents, the preface, the errata, and three separate chapters across the first quarter of the book. https://debunking-cesletter.com/book-of-mormon-1/first-book-of-napoleon-comparison/ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Debunking the Connection between The First Book of Napoleon and the Book of Mormon," Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, June 25, 2019. Identifies thirteen shared phrases between FBN and the Book of Mormon and documents King James Bible chapter-and-verse provenance for each. Heavy Metal's stated conclusion: "Since a majority of the phrases found in the First Book of Napoleon and the Book of Mormon are also found in the Bible, there is no reason to believe that the First Book of Napoleon was a significant influence." Cites FBN 16:5 ("His nightly path is lighted by fiery spectres...") as an example of FBN's elaborate prose register, distinct from the Book of Mormon's plainer pseudo-biblical style. The framing as "elaborate, ornate Victorian construction" is this article's own characterization, not Heavy Metal's. https://heavymetalmormon.com/2019/06/25/did-the-first-book-of-napoleon-inspire-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Eran 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 ("'A Truly American Spirit of Writing': Pseudobiblicism, the Early Republic, and the Cultural Origins of the Book of Mormon"). The strongest non-Latter-day-Saint academic statement of the cultural-milieu argument. Shalev argues pseudo-biblicism "may have helped to ameliorate readers' reactions to and digestion of the Mormon Bible." Crucially, Shalev concedes "no direct ties connecting the Book of Mormon to pseudo-biblicism" and frames "assessing the assertion that pseudo-biblicism had actually participated in and contributed to the reception of the Book of Mormon" as "a daunting, not to say a futile task." His thesis is reception-conditioning, not production-source. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205909/american-zion/. Internet Archive borrowable copy: https://archive.org/details/americanzionoldt0000shal ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Eran Shalev, "'Written in the Style of Antiquity': Pseudo-Biblicism and the Early American Republic, 1770–1830," Church History 79, no. 4 (December 2010): 800–826. Documents pseudo-biblical writing as a genre originating in 18th-century British satire (Dodsley 1740) and adopted by Americans during and after the Revolution. Shalev catalogs over twenty pseudo-biblical texts and argues this was a "unique and forgotten tradition" produced by an age "still suffused with the Bible yet at the same time Enlightened as to the liberal use of that book's language." https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/S0009640710001162 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Eran Shalev, "An American Book of Chronicles: Pseudo-Biblicism and the Cultural Origins of the Book of Mormon," in Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon, ed. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). Shalev republishes/extends the same thesis in this Oxford volume, again concluding that pseudo-biblicism was "prevalent enough in the cultural landscape" to potentially condition Book of Mormon readers but that "there is no clear evidence to connect the Book of Mormon to this popular form of political and cultural expression." https://academic.oup.com/book/38717/chapter-abstract/336893749 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Michael Linning [Eliakim the Scribe], The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth: Written in the 5813th Year of the World, and 1809th Year of the Christian Era (Edinburgh, 1809). Full text at https://archive.org/details/firstbooknapole00gruagoog (full PDF and OCR; the OCR can be searched directly at https://archive.org/stream/firstbooknapole00gruagoog/firstbooknapole00gruagoog_djvu.txt). The phrase "perverse wickedness" appears in FBN's chapter 3 summary in the table of contents (a recap of chapter contents) and at chapter 2, verse 10 ("the perverse wickedness of the Gauls"). The body verse the chapter 3 summary points to (Ch. 3, v. 21, p. 25) reads: "And it pleased the Lord, as a punishment for the wickedness and perverseness of the people, to deliver into the hands of this man the dominion over many lands." Archive.org lists 161 total pages including front matter; the four-bookseller imprint (Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme; J.J. Stockdale; P. Hill; M. Keene) appears on the title page. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Michael Linning," Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Linning. Linning was born September 24, 1774; died February 17, 1838; attended Glasgow College 1788–1793; was admitted as a Writer to His Majesty's Signet. His authorship of FBN is established by a pre-publication fair-copy manuscript at the State Library of New South Wales, prepared by Sir Thomas Livingstone Mitchell while staying with the Linning family at Peggy's Mill in 1809. The 1810 British Critic review observed that the book's "elegantly printed" production placed it beyond the reach of ordinary British Bible-readers; The Nation in 1908 described FBN as "very curious as well as rare." Linning later proposed (1816) the National Monument of Scotland and patented (1837) a peat-to-fuel conversion process. Linning was born September 24, 1774, the son of Thomas Linning and grandson of the Reverend Thomas Linning of Lesmahagow. The pseudonym "Eliakim" appears to be a reversed spelling (anadrome) of "Mikaile" (Michael), pairing the wordplay with the scribal pun. Linning also served as Secretary of the Royal Association for the National Monument. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Did the Book of Napoleon Influence the Book of Mormon?" Saints Unscripted (December 2023; companion website article dated January 9, 2024). Documents the State Library of New South Wales fair-copy manuscript and credits SLNSW staff for sending images directly. Saints Unscripted: "Just because two books share some phraseology does not mean one inspired the other." And: "The longer and more complicated you have to make your list to explain away the Book of Mormon without good evidence, the more contrived and unlikely the authorship theory actually becomes." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCwfJKU7chY ↩︎
Linning, First Book of Napoleon (1809), chapter 1 (the horned idol with inscriptions "Sedition, Privy Conspiracy, and Rebellion"); chapter 16 (the parable of the Bear and the Monkey, in which the Monkey transforms into a Tiger devouring the Bear); chapters 17–19 (the vision sequence in which Napoleon transforms into a dragon); chapters 20–23 (warnings to Albion). The Heavy Metal Book of Mormon analysis cites the chapter 16 line "His nightly path is lighted by fiery spectres, that sport and dance along the polar sky, and play amidst the wintry stars" as an example of FBN's distinct stylistic register, more elaborate than the Book of Mormon's plainer pseudo-biblical prose. Archive.org full text: https://archive.org/details/firstbooknapole00gruagoog ↩︎
No American edition, bookshop listing, library catalog entry, or personal inventory from before 1830 has been documented for The First Book of Napoleon. The book was sold exclusively through British Isles booksellers (Longman, Hurst, Rees & Orme of London; J.J. Stockdale of London; P. Hill of Edinburgh; M. Keene of Dublin). The earliest known American printings are post-2010 print-on-demand reprints (Leopold Classic Library, Forgotten Books, etc.). See Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 7," FAIR Blog, September 10, 2021. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2021/09/10/the-ces-letter-rebuttal-part-7. See also "First Book of Napoleon," Debunking the CES Letter. https://debunking-cesletter.com/book-of-mormon-1/first-book-of-napoleon/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Bibliographic survey of FBN listings on AbeBooks, Goodreads, Google Books (id: 6scCAAAAYAAJ), and Internet Archive metadata, all of which confirm a single 1809 Edinburgh/London printing of the original edition. The earliest American printings located are 21st-century print-on-demand reprints from imprints like Leopold Classic Library and Forgotten Books. Archive.org primary copy: https://archive.org/details/firstbooknapole00gruagoog ↩︎
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. Documents that the Book of Mormon translation occupied between 57 and 63 actual working days from April 7 to June 30, 1829, producing approximately 269,510 words across 608 manuscript pages. Welch reports Skousen's finding: "There are very few signs of any editing or Joseph changing his mind about the translation." Eyewitness accounts: Oliver Cowdery (primary scribe) "with the exception of a few pages, I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon… as it fell from the lips of the Prophet"; Emma Smith — Joseph could "begin where he had left off" without re-reading; David Whitmer — translation work at his father's home "occupied about one month, that is, from June 1st to July 1st, 1829." Welch's own observation: Joseph had no time for "research, for collocating scattered scriptural phrases, for keeping track of numerous threads." https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/timing-the-translation-of-the-book-of-mormon-days-and-hours-never-to-be-forgotten/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"Many Names: Evidence Central," Scripture Central. Documents that the Book of Mormon contains 337 distinct proper names, of which 188 are unique to the Book of Mormon and 149 are common with the Bible. https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/many-names ↩︎ ↩︎
John L. Sorenson, Mormon's Codex: An Ancient American Book (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book and Neal A. Maxwell Institute, 2013). Documents that the Book of Mormon's roughly 150 place names form a coherent internal spatial system across the text's 1,000 narrative years. The Limited Geography Model has survived rigorous textual cross-checking despite never being tied to a specific modern map. https://deseretbook.com/p/mormons-codex-ancient-american-book-john-l-sorenson-92825 ↩︎ ↩︎
Matthew Roper, Paul J. Fields, and G. Bruce Schaalje, "Stylometric Analyses of the Book of Mormon: A Short History," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 21, no. 1 (2012): 28–45. Documents the application of discriminant analysis and the extended nearest shrunken centroid (ENSC) method to the Book of Mormon, finding that the Book of Mormon's principal authorial voices are statistically distinguishable and that 19th-century candidate authors (Joseph Smith, Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, Oliver Cowdery, Parley Pratt) all fail to match. The function-word "wordprint" methodology used in Larsen-Rencher-Layton (1980) and Hilton (1990) is now several decades old, and mainstream stylometry has moved on to more powerful methods (Burrows's Delta, machine-learning-based authorship attribution, larger n-gram analysis). The non-Latter-day Saint stylometry community has not engaged the Book of Mormon authorship question at all in roughly thirty-five years; the field's current debate is internal to Latter-day Saint scholarship. The narrower claim the data supports — statistically distinguishable patterns within the Book of Mormon, consistent with multiple authorial voices — is well-grounded. The stronger claim — that this proves multi-author ancient origin — is a stretch the underlying methodology cannot bear. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol21/iss1/4/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). Documents the saturation of early-republic American religious print culture with biblical-style writing, prophetic-style pamphlets, and restorationist-millenarian discourse — the cultural environment in which the Book of Mormon emerged. ↩︎
Matthew Roper and Paul J. Fields, "Scriptural Style in Early Nineteenth Century American Literature," FAIR Conference, August 2014. Multivariate stylometric analysis (discriminant analysis, principal components analysis, nearest shrunken centroids) of the 1830 Book of Mormon, The First Book of Napoleon, The Late War, The American Revolution, and the King James Bible across four dimensions of King-James-Bible-style analysis. Documents that the Book of Mormon is roughly 2x more similar to the King James Bible than pseudo-biblical texts on non-contextual structural words; "almost identical" on archaic pronouns; approximately seven times more similar on distinguishing phrases; and uses Latin-style possessives at roughly 25 per 10,000 words versus 250–400 per 10,000 in pseudo-biblical texts. Their summary: "If Joseph Smith was 'influenced' by those books, his imitation of the King James style was better than theirs. Joseph Smith was either a literary genius, or a prophet, and we are all free to take our pick." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2014/scriptural-style-in-early-nineteenth-century-american-literature ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Sarah Allen, "The CES Letter Rebuttal, Part 7," FAIR Blog, September 10, 2021. Allen documents that the CES Letter's first comparison "took 25 pages of the book to compile" and that "a full 1/6 of the book was used to recreate one incomplete paragraph of text." She also notes the Book of Mormon side spans "three chapters and the title page, 11 pages altogether, and it bounces all over the place," and observes that pseudo-biblical King James Bible-imitation writing "was pretty popular from approximately 1750 to approximately 1850, about 100 years." https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/blog/2021/09/10/the-ces-letter-rebuttal-part-7 ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Samuel Sandmel, "Parallelomania," Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 1 (1962): 1–13. Originally delivered as the Society of Biblical Literature presidential address, December 27, 1961. The foundational methodological critique of finding parallels between texts without controlling for shared third sources, genre conventions, access, or specificity. PDF available at http://www.ediguys.net/index_files/parallelomania_sandmel.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
Douglas F. Salmon, "Parallelomania and the Study of Latter-day Scripture: Confirmation, Coincidence, or the Collective Unconscious?" Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 33, no. 2 (2000): 129–156. Salmon applies Sandmel's framework to Latter-day Saint apologetic scholarship, articulating seven methodological questions for evaluating any claimed parallel: methodology of selection, single-word vs. phrase, contextual fit, text-selection criteria, manuscript age, manuscript provenance, original language. The same framework cuts against the CES Letter's parallel-finding here. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/sbi/articles/Dialogue_V33N02_139.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎
William J. Hamblin, "Joseph or Jung? A Response to Douglas Salmon," Review of Books on the Book of Mormon 13, no. 2 (2001), Article 12. Defends the careful use of parallels in Latter-day Saint scholarship while accepting Salmon's methodological criteria. Hamblin's framework: parallels can count as evidence when they meet stricter criteria of specificity, distinctiveness, controlled comparison, and explicit access argument. Useful for evaluating both pro-Latter-day-Saint and critical parallel-finding exercises. The journal was later renamed Mormon Studies Review. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/msr/vol13/iss2/12/ ↩︎
Benjamin L. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 7 (2013): 323–355. Detailed five-flaw critique of the Johnson 4-gram methodology, with quantitative data: 13.7% of shared 4-grams from copyright boilerplate; 0.27% of unique Book of Mormon 4-grams shared with The Late War; 57.3% of shared 4-grams also in the King James Bible; 1.4% Pride and Prejudice / Officer's Daughter overlap demonstrating false positives. McGuire reproduces the Uniform Match Score data from the Johnsons' WordTree blog at p. 330 ("The Late War transmitted textual influence to The Book of Nullification is highest (0.37), followed by The Book of Mormon (0.24)") and p. 350 ("The influence from The First Book of Napoleon on Hunt's The Late War was 0.06") — the figures originate with the Johnson study and McGuire is the published source that cites them for critical purposes. (The first published comparison putting The Book of Nullification 0.37 alongside the Book of Mormon's 0.24 was Metacannon, March 2014; see the Late War article for that strand.) McGuire is a Latter-day Saint writing in a faith-affirming journal; his critiques are independently verifiable from the Johnson study's own data. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/the-late-war-against-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Jeff Lindsay, "The Book of Mormon and Leaves of Grass: A Spectacular Demonstration of Plagiarism." Satirical reductio applying parallel-finding methodology to "prove" Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855), published twenty-five years after the Book of Mormon, was a "source" for it. Demonstrates that the parallel-finding method is unreliable in principle. https://www.jefflindsay.com/bomsource.shtml ↩︎ ↩︎
The principled distinction matters because phrase-level parallel-finding without controls (the methodology behind both the CES Letter's curated comparison and the Johnson 4-gram study) and structural-feature analysis (Carmack's counting of specific syntactic constructions across controlled corpora with statistical significance testing) ask different questions, control for genre, and have different reliability properties. So when this article cites the absence of Book of Mormon syntactic features in pseudo-biblical texts (Carmack), it is not relying on the same noisy methodology it dismisses when applied to phrase-level "parallels." The full distinction: phrase-level matches between English texts are statistically expected when both texts share a third source like the King James Bible, so noisy phrase-parallels are not strong evidence in either direction; structural features like Early Modern English ditransitive command syntax, Hebrew if/and conditionals, and Latin-style possessive ratios are not generated by KJV imitation, so their presence or absence carries more signal than phrase parallels do. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Finding Answers to B.H. Roberts's Questions and 'An Unparallel,'" FARMS preliminary report, 1985. Catalogues over eighty differences between View of the Hebrews and the Book of Mormon, demonstrating that any parallel-finding exercise that catalogues only similarities and not differences is methodologically incomplete. The same principle applies to the FBN comparison: an honest analysis must include the dimensions on which the two books diverge. ↩︎
Robert F. Smith, "'It Came to Pass' in the Bible and the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report (1980). Documents that "and it came to pass" translates the Hebrew narrative formula wayehi (consecutive imperfect of hayah, "to be"). The King James Bible uses "it came to pass" approximately 727 times; the Book of Mormon approximately 1,494 times in the original 1830 text. https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/smith/2019-01-04/robert_f._smith_it_came_to_pass_in_the_bible_and_the_book_of_mormon_1980.pdf. See also Donald W. Parry, "And It Came to Pass," in Preserved in Translation: Hebrew and Other Ancient Literary Forms in the Book of Mormon (Provo: BYU RSC). https://rsc.byu.edu/preserved-translation/it-came-pass ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Chris and Duane Johnson, WordTree Foundation 4-gram study, presented at the ExMormon Foundation conference, October 2013. The study compared the 1830 Book of Mormon against approximately 100,000–130,000 pre-1830 books from Archive.org. The Johnsons reported that The Late War ranked in the "top 0.001%" by similarity to the Book of Mormon. Duane Johnson acknowledged on the project blog: "Certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking." The Johnsons have not published the methodology in any peer-reviewed venue, and as of 2014 had not responded to or defended their methodology against the McGuire and Schaalje critiques. http://wordtree.org/thelatewar/ (intermittent TLS issues; raw data on GitHub). ↩︎ ↩︎
WordTree Foundation, "4-gram-study," GitHub. The repository contains "TODO: steps to reproduce scoring" and "TODO: steps to reproduce ranking" — the methodology was never fully documented for independent verification. https://github.com/wordtreefoundation/4-gram-study ↩︎
G. Bruce Schaalje, "A Bayesian Cease-Fire in the Late War on the Book of Mormon," Interpreter Foundation Blog, November 6, 2013. Note: this is a blog post, not a peer-reviewed publication. The statistical methodology is transparent and the underlying Bayesian framework is standard, but Schaalje's specific probability estimates have not been validated by independent peer review. The core reasoning — that being the most similar text in a corpus does not, by itself, demonstrate meaningful influence when absolute similarity is trivially low — does not depend on the specific priors. https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog-a-bayesian-cease-fire-in-the-late-war-on-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). The most widely cited literary-academic treatment of the Book of Mormon as a literary artifact. Hardy documents the Book of Mormon's distinct authorial voices, narrative restraint, and structural complexity — features that distinguish the Book of Mormon as a literary work from any single-author pseudo-biblical text. Published by Oxford University Press, not a Latter-day Saint apologetic press. https://global.oup.com/academic/product/understanding-the-book-of-mormon-9780199842490 ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us About Book of Mormon Authorship," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 13 (2015): 175–217. Documents the Book of Mormon's 79% finite complementation after command (vs. 19% in the King James Bible), statistically significant at p < 10⁻²⁷. Argues the Book of Mormon's command-syntax pattern matches Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend more closely than the 1611 King James Bible. Conclusion: "All the evidence indicates that Joseph Smith would not have produced the structures found in the text using the King James Bible as a model, nor from his own language." https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/what-command-syntax-tells-us-about-book-of-mormon-authorship/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "The More Part of the Book of Mormon Is Early Modern English," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 18 (2016). https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/interpreter/vol18/iss1/8/ ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 25 (2017). Documents that Joseph Smith's own 1832 history uses periphrastic did at 0%, while the Book of Mormon uses it at high frequency. Joseph's own English does not match the Book of Mormon's. https://journal.interpreterfoundation.org/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar-evidence-from-the-1832-history/ ↩︎ ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 28 (2018): 177–232. Carmack's 2018 study analyzed nearly ten syntactic and morphosyntactic features in four pseudo-biblical authors in depth — John Leacock (1774–1775), Richard Snowden (1793), Michael Linning (FBN, 1809), and Gilbert Hunt (1816) — comparing them against the King James Bible and the 1830 Book of Mormon, with reference to a broader corpus of approximately twenty-five pseudo-biblical works. Linning-specific data: agentive of at ~15% (4 of 27 regular verbs); personal which at ~5% (2 instances); periphrastic did with one example; {-th} plural with two questionable examples. Carmack's overall conclusions: "No pseudo-biblical author came close to what is found in the Book of Mormon"; "The Book of Mormon is uncorrelated with the King James Bible in this domain… negatively correlated with all four pseudo-biblical writings, usually strongly negatively correlated." An important academic-status caveat to surface: Carmack publishes almost exclusively in Interpreter (an LDS scholarly venue), and his corpus methodology — early-modern collocation searches in OED and EEBO databases — has not yet been substantively engaged by mainstream historical-linguistics journals as of the article's publication, eight-plus years on. Standard objections (statistical outliers in any large corpus; pseudo-biblical authors adopting archaic registers; database coverage gaps) are real. The lexical findings are the most resilient core because they make point claims about specific words; the grammatical-frequency claims are more dependent on corpus methodology not yet independently validated. The Joseph-1832 baseline (Carmack 2017) remains the cleanest sub-argument since it does not depend on the contested corpus methodology at all. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Wesley P. Walters, "The Use of the Old Testament in the Book of Mormon" (M.A. thesis, BYU, 1981). Walters was a critic of Joseph Smith and a leading proponent of the Spalding-Rigdon theory of Book of Mormon authorship; his MA thesis focuses on biblical use in the Book of Mormon and does not name The First Book of Napoleon as a candidate source. The earliest serious mention of FBN as a Book of Mormon source appears to be the WordTree Foundation 4-gram presentation in 2013, 184 years after the Book of Mormon's publication. ↩︎
Dan Vogel, Joseph Smith: The Making of a Prophet (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2004). The standard naturalistic biographical treatment of Joseph Smith's environment, including the cultural-milieu version of the argument that 19th-century American religious culture was saturated with biblical-style writing, restorationist theology, and other elements that allegedly explain Book of Mormon themes. ↩︎
Brent Lee Metcalfe, ed., New Approaches to the Book of Mormon: Explorations in Critical Methodology (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 1993). Edited volume containing critical-side essays advancing cultural-environment explanations for Book of Mormon production. The arguments in this volume are the serious academic version of the cultural-context critique; the CES Letter's FBN section is a popularized derivative of this broader tradition. ↩︎
Richard L. Bushman, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling (New York: Knopf, 2005). The standard biographical-cultural treatment of Joseph Smith's life and environment by a Columbia University historian. Documents the religious, cultural, and intellectual environment in which the Book of Mormon emerged — useful as a balanced reference for the cultural-milieu argument. ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, "Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon: A Preliminary Survey," BYU Studies 11, no. 1 (1970): 50–60. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/hebraisms-in-the-book-of-mormon-a-preliminary-survey/. See also Donald W. Parry, "Hebraisms and Other Ancient Peculiarities in the Book of Mormon," in Echoes and Evidences of the Book of Mormon, ed. Donald W. Parry, Daniel C. Peterson, and John W. Welch (Provo: FARMS, 2002), 155–189. Documents the if/and conditional construction (~14 examples in the original 1830 Book of Mormon, ungrammatical in English, absent from the King James Bible, present in Hebrew via waw-consecutive); cognate accusatives ("dreamed a dream," "curse with a sore curse"); construct-state noun chains ("plates of brass," "rod of iron," "altar of stones," etc.); repeated possessive pronouns; adverbial phrases substituting for adverbs; and singular verbs with grammatically singular plural-meaning Hebrew nouns ("this people is"). Most of the if/and constructions were corrected to standard English in the 1837 edition. https://rsc.byu.edu/preserved-translation/it-came-pass and the FAIR Wiki Hebraisms hub: https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/Hebraisms_in_the_Book_of_Mormon ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2012): 79–98. Documents the discovery of three limestone altars at the Bar'an temple near Marib, Yemen, inscribed with the South Arabian tribal name NHM. The altars date to roughly 800–700 BC; the tribal reference within (Naw'um of the Nihm tribe, grandfather of donor Bi'athtar) predates the altars by approximately fifty years, placing the Nihm tribe in roughly 850–750 BC. The Nihm tribal area lies in the mountains northeast of Sana'a, eastward from which is "the only fertile area in over a thousand miles of coastline" — corresponding to 1 Nephi 17:1's "nearly eastward" turn from Nahom to Bountiful. See also Warren P. Aston, "Newly Found Altars from Nahom," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 10, no. 2 (2001): 56–61. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Y. Yadin, "Expedition D — The Cave of Letters," Israel Exploration Journal 12, no. 3/4 (1962): 250, 253. The Cave of Letters in the Judean Desert was excavated by Yadin's team in March 1960 and March 1961; documents containing the personal name "Alma ben Yehudah" (Alma son of Judah) date to the Bar Kokhba period (c. AD 132–135). Hugh Nibley brought the finding to broader Latter-day Saint attention in 1973. See also Paul Y. Hoskisson, "What's in a Name? Alma as a Hebrew Name," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998); "More Evidence for Alma as a Semitic Name," Interpreter Foundation, https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/more-evidence-for-alma-as-a-semitic-name/; Book of Mormon Onomasticon entry "ALMA," https://onoma.lib.byu.edu/index.php/ALMA. The Onomasticon notes that an ossuary inscription "Judah son of Alma," dating to between the first century BC and first century AD, predates the Bar Kokhba documents as the earliest attestation of the name in Jewish antiquity. ↩︎
John W. Welch, "Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies 10, no. 1 (1969): 69–84. Welch's foundational identification of chiasmus throughout the Book of Mormon, including the extended chiasmus at Alma 36 (19 elements with Christ as the structural pivot), Mosiah 5:10–12, and Mosiah 3:18–19. Welch argues that no comprehensive scholarly understanding of chiasmus as a Hebrew literary device existed in America in 1830; the systematic recognition came later, particularly with Nils Lund's Chiasmus in the New Testament in 1942. PDF: https://archive.bookofmormoncentral.org/sites/default/files/archive-files/pdf/welch/2015-10-21/john_w._welch_chiasmus_in_the_book_of_mormon_1969.pdf ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"The Newly Found Letter from John W. Welch to Robert K. Thomas Two Days after the Discovery of Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon," BYU Studies. Primary-source documentation, dated August 18, 1967, of Welch's discovery of chiasmus while serving as a missionary in Regensburg, Germany — within days of the discovery itself. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/the-newly-found-letter-from-john-w-welch-to-robert-k-thomas-two-days-after-the-discovery-of-chiasmus-in-the-book-of-mormon ↩︎
Earl M. Wunderli, An Imperfect Book: What the Book of Mormon Tells Us about Itself (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2013), ch. 6. Wunderli contests Welch's chiasmus methodology, arguing that the selection of "key" elements is subjective and that Welch's analyses have not been adequately tested against null-hypothesis controls. See also Daymon Smith, "What is Chiasmus, and Why Should We Care?" (online essay critiquing Welch's framework). Welch and Boyd F. Edwards have responded with statistical-validation models in subsequent Interpreter and BYU Studies publications; the methodological debate is genuinely contested rather than settled. ↩︎
Wayne A. Larsen, Alvin C. Rencher, and Tim Layton, "Who Wrote the Book of Mormon? An Analysis of Wordprints," BYU Studies 20, no. 3 (1980): 225–251. Foundational stylometric study using common-function-word frequency patterns to identify multiple statistically distinct authorial wordprints in the Book of Mormon, consistent with the named internal authors and inconsistent with single 19th-century authorship. ↩︎
John L. Hilton, "On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship," BYU Studies 30, no. 3 (1990). Independent verification of the Larsen-Rencher-Layton results using a different methodology, conducted with non-Latter-day Saint researchers (the "Berkeley Group"). ↩︎
Royal Skousen, "Joseph Smith's Translation of the Book of Mormon: Evidence for Tight Control of the Text," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998). Skousen's analysis of the original and printer's manuscripts: the 28% of the original manuscript that survives, plus the complete printer's manuscript, shows a pattern of dictation in which Joseph Smith was reading words rather than composing. Spellings of unfamiliar names are consistent across the manuscript even when the same name occurs hundreds of pages apart; misspellings reflect mishearings (phonetic errors), not misreadings; no drafting, no marginalia indicating second thoughts, no false starts. See also Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009; rev. ed. 2022). ↩︎
Royal Skousen, The Book of Mormon: The Earliest Text (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009; rev. ed. 2022). Skousen's reconstructed earliest-text edition based on the surviving 28% of the original manuscript and the complete printer's manuscript. The introduction documents Skousen's "tight control" finding — that Joseph Smith's dictation produced a fixed text rather than a composed-on-the-fly text. Published by Yale University Press, not a Latter-day Saint apologetic press. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300142181/the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎
Emma Smith, "Last Testimony of Sister Emma," Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289–290. Emma Smith's account of the translation process: Joseph "had neither manuscript nor book to read from"; he could "begin where he had left off" after interruptions without re-reading; she sat at the same table during translation work and observed the process directly. Emma's account was given decades after the events, after Joseph's death, when she had no remaining loyalty motive to the Utah Church. ↩︎
David Whitmer, An Address to All Believers in Christ (Richmond, MO, 1887). Whitmer's published account of the translation process, including the seer-stone-in-hat method and the timing of the work at his family home in Fayette, NY ("about one month, that is, from June 1st to July 1st, 1829"). Whitmer was excommunicated in 1838 and never rejoined the Church; his testimony of the Book of Mormon translation was given as a disaffected former leader who maintained the testimony to his death in 1888. ↩︎
The caveat matters because Linning's failure to reproduce Book of Mormon syntactic patterns is not a head-to-head "Linning tried and failed" comparison; it is a genre-level observation. Linning's purpose was satirizing Napoleon, and the pseudo-biblical genre was a rhetorical mode for political commentary, not a target style to imitate at maximum density. His syntactic profile is therefore informative as a data point about what a sophisticated author writing in the pseudo-biblical genre, with whatever effort the genre conventionally required, produced. The same genre-level observation holds across all four pseudo-biblical authors Carmack analyzed in depth: regardless of education, revision opportunity, or compositional purpose, none of them produced the Book of Mormon's syntactic profile. ↩︎
The cultural-milieu hypothesis does not require 1829 source-text consultation; it requires only that pseudo-biblical conventions were absorbed in Joseph Smith's pre-1829 cultural environment. By 1829, on that hypothesis, the conventions were already internalized — there would be no source text for a 1829 scribe to whistleblow on. Lucy Mack Smith's primary-source account that Joseph was thinking about and discussing the content of what would become the Book of Mormon for years before the dictation began (see
[^LucyMackSmith]) is the cultural-milieu version's most explicit primary-source anchor and is engaged in that footnote. ↩︎