Book of Mormon
The CES Letter opens its longest section by calling two apostles as witnesses for the prosecution. Ezra Taft Benson described the Book of Mormon as the keystone of the faith, the stone that holds the arch up; pull it, he said, and the whole structure falls. Jeffrey R. Holland framed it as a "sudden death" proposition: the book is either what Joseph Smith said it is, or the Church and its founder are false from the first instance onward, with no third possibility.[1] The letter agrees with both men and builds its strategy on them. Strike the keystone first, and a reader who comes away shaken will meet everything after it, the Book of Abraham, polygamy, the temple, already braced for a foundation that has cracked.
On the framing, the letter is right. The Book of Mormon is the decisive question. It is also the place where the letter is weakest, because under all the variety, every argument in the section is the same claim wearing different clothes: that a young farmer in 1829 New York wrote the book himself. DNA, anachronisms, archaeology, the King James language, the rival books are all ways of supplying the naturalistic how. So the test to put to each claim is not just whether its facts hold, but whether it delivers a working mechanism, a path by which Joseph produces this book without the ancient record he said he was translating.
Most of those arguments never get that far, because most of them run on compression. A number quoted with no source. Thirteen anachronisms in a single sentence. Two columns set side by side, trusting the reader's eye to draw a conclusion the text never states. At reading speed it works. Slow one of them down, trace it back to the primary documents, and more of them than you would expect turn all the way around.
"He copied his Bible"
The first three arguments are one question printed three times. King James errors, italics, and mistranslations all ask the same thing: what is the Book of Mormon's relationship to the King James Bible? The biblical passages do read like the King James Version. They carry what the CES Letter calls "1769 edition errors," they keep the KJV's italicized words, and they preserve renderings modern scholars count as mistakes. The proposed mechanism could not be simpler: Joseph dictated with the family Bible open in front of him.
The manuscript record does not cooperate.
The errors supposedly "unique to the 1769 edition" are not unique to it; the same readings sit in the 1611 first printing. Royal Skousen, who has spent more than thirty years rebuilding the text from the original manuscripts, traces its actual base not to the 1769 Oxford Bible the letter names but to later American printings. The whole claim rests on a premise its own evidence contradicts.
Then the italics. King James translators added certain words for readability and set them in a distinct typeface. A copyist would have no reason to single them out. Yet in the Book of Mormon those italicized words go missing about forty times as often as the words around them, a pattern Stan Spencer judged far too lopsided to be chance, and the exact opposite of what a copyist would leave behind.
Where the book's scripture leaves the KJV behind, it tends to land on the older reading. At Isaiah 2:16 the Hebrew tradition kept one half of a line and the Greek Septuagint kept the other; the Book of Mormon keeps both, though Joseph read no Greek and no English Septuagint circulated in 1829. In the Sermon on the Mount it drops "without a cause" from the warning against anger, a phrase the earliest manuscripts also lack and modern Bibles now treat as a later insertion. The Book of Mormon reached that reading in 1829, fifteen years before Codex Sinaiticus surfaced to settle it.
The strongest form of the copying charge is narrower, and worth meeting head-on: four verses in 1 Nephi where Joseph inserted the words "the Son of" for the 1837 edition. Jerald and Sandra Tanner combed the whole textual history for doctrinally meaningful edits and came back with these four. By the critics' own search, the iceberg is four verses deep.
Pull back from the verse-by-verse fights and the scale alone reframes the charge. Verbatim biblical quotation runs to something like six or seven percent of the book's 270,000 words; even counting every chapter that leans on the Bible at all, Philip Barlow reaches just twenty-seven of 239. The rest is original. The largest of the borrowed blocks is Isaiah, and the book does not simply transcribe it. Nephi, his brother Jacob, and later Abinadi quote Isaiah at length and then go to work on it, expounding it, applying it to their own exile, and at points rendering it closer to the ancient text than the King James Bible Joseph supposedly leaned on. By the book's own account, Lehi's household carried the brass plates of Laban out of Jerusalem: the five books of Moses and the prophets, Isaiah among them, the scriptural inheritance a devout Jewish family of about 600 BC would have known by heart. A family steeped in Isaiah, quoting and unfolding Isaiah, is what the narrative would lead you to expect. The alternative the CES Letter needs is a young farmer with the family Bible open in front of him.
"There were never any Nephites"
DNA, anachronisms, an empty archaeological record: this set of claims doesn't try to explain how Joseph wrote the book. It tries to prove there was nothing for him to write about, that the civilization the book describes never existed. None of the three holds up, and two of them, looked at closely, end up working for the book instead.
Genetics is presented as the closed case, so start there. It is not even a negative case. Ask a population geneticist what trace a small founding group leaves after twenty-six centuries of intermarriage, and the answer cuts against the argument. Henry Harpending, of the National Academy of Sciences, estimated that fifty seafarers absorbed into a larger population that long ago would leave at most an occasional stray genetic marker, the kind a researcher would write off as recent admixture. A single family arriving in an already-peopled hemisphere, which is the migration the book actually describes, predicts the genetic picture we have. The genetics can neither sink the book nor confirm it, and the air of a settled verdict the letter projects has no basis in the science.
Anachronisms have a way of becoming evidence for the other side. Pre-Columbian barley, denied for a century, was confirmed in 1983. A meter-long sword of iron hardened into steel came out of the ground at Vered Jericho, in Laban's own region and century, the very object 1 Nephi 4:9 describes and that critics once called impossible. Horse remains from Mexico have been radiocarbon-dated into Book of Mormon windows. For the whole list of thirteen impossible items, the CES Letter cites one source: Wikipedia. Several of these supposed blunders have quietly resolved in the book's favor.
"Absolutely no archaeological evidence" is a universal negative, and it fails as stated. The Smithsonian "statement" the letter leans on is a form letter, revised after a Latter-day Saint scholar catalogued its errors. The man the section builds its archaeology around, Thomas Stuart Ferguson, was no archaeologist; he was a lawyer and an enthusiast. And while the section was insisting nothing had ever been found, three ancient altars carved with the tribal name NHM came out of the sand near Marib, in Yemen, sitting where the Book of Mormon's "Nahom" should sit, at the one latitude where Lehi's family could turn east toward the sea just as the next verse says.[2] The archaeological record is thinner than a believer would like, and a long way from the void the letter describes.
On geography, the Church has declined to fix Book of Mormon locations since the 1920s, less a modern retreat than an admission that the text gives no coordinates. The much-circulated map matching Nephite names to towns near Joseph's boyhood home does not hold up under its own weight: several of those towns were named after 1830, several of the names are simply biblical, and the layout fights the book's own internal geography.
Not all of this breaks the believer's way. No Book of Mormon city has been tied to a confirmed archaeological site, and large-scale ironworking in the pre-Columbian Americas is still unattested. The linked articles grant both and work through them. What the evidence will not carry is the sweeping "nothing, ever" the section is built on.
"He borrowed it from books of his own day"
The final argument returns to the how and overreaches. Three books printed before 1830 are laid out side by side, as if they reinforced one another: View of the Hebrews, The Late War, and The First Book of Napoleon. They can't. Joseph cannot have copied from all three, which disagree with the Book of Mormon, and with each other, on nearly everything that matters. A case that needs three incompatible sources does not yet have one.
Take them on their merits anyway. View of the Hebrews is the book the Church supposedly buried. BYU's Religious Studies Center reprinted it in full in 1996, which is a strange way to bury anything. Laid beside the Book of Mormon by John Welch, it yields 84 substantive differences. The biographical hook, that Oliver Cowdery had once sat in author Ethan Smith's congregation, turns out to be false. And B.H. Roberts, whose private musings the CES Letter quotes as if they were a confession, defended the Book of Mormon to the end of his life. The shared themes trace to a Hebrew-Indian theory that filled the air in the 1820s; Ethan Smith's book was one voice in a crowd of them.
The Late War and The First Book of Napoleon trade on a real but shallow resemblance. All three books were written to imitate King James English, so all three share its cadence. Go beneath the surface and the likeness thins out. On the one quantitative study the critics themselves cite, a four-gram analysis ranking texts by their similarity to The Late War, The First Book of Napoleon scores 0.06 against the Book of Mormon's 0.24, and an unrelated 1830s tariff pamphlet swept into the same study scores 0.37. The book held up as the smoking gun is the faintest match in the data. Down at the level of grammar the distance becomes a gulf: across twenty-five of these King-James-imitating books, not one produced a single finite causative of the kind the Book of Mormon uses 235 times. Its syntax runs two centuries older than the English Joseph spoke.
The case for the defense
Strip the section to its frame and it is a curated list of the best objections a century and a half of criticism has produced. The list is more revealing for what it omits: the affirmative case, the features of the Book of Mormon that get harder to explain the closer you look.
Begin with the names. Alma turns up as a man's name, an odd choice in 1829 English, and was confirmed as a genuine ancient Hebrew male name only generations later, on a deed dug out of the Judean desert. Sariah, Lehi's wife, surfaced on a Jewish ostracon from Egypt.[3] A peer-reviewed catalog now lists sixteen Book of Mormon names attested in ancient Hebrew inscriptions, none of them in the English Bible,[4] alongside 188 names with no biblical source at all.[5] Then the geography that does check out, half a world from upstate New York: Nahom in the Arabian desert, and due east of it, where the text steers Lehi's family, a rare fertile stretch of coast answering to the book's "Bountiful." Add the chiasmus and Hebrew wordplay nobody in Joseph's world was looking for, a thousand-year narrative whose internal map never trips over itself, and authorial voices distinct enough for statistical analysis to tell apart.
Underneath all of it sits the plainest fact of all. A farmer in his early twenties, with little formal schooling and no manuscript anywhere in the room, dictated the whole book aloud, in order, over a matter of months, never going back to revise what he had already given, while the people writing it down watched it happen and afterward signed statements they would not retract, several of them long after they had left the Church on bad terms. His own few surviving letters from those years read nothing like the book. The how the whole section was built to deliver never arrives. The CES Letter spends twenty pages on the seams of the book and never reckons with the book.
Read the articles in this section for the case in full; every figure on this page is sourced there, the hard parts included. Then read the Book of Mormon, the one piece of evidence the whole argument has to work around. Taken singly, the CES Letter's points each account for a detail, a word, a name, a phrase, while the book they are aimed at goes unexplained.
The letter went after the keystone first, by design, expecting the rest of its case to follow once the foundation gave way. The foundation did not give way. Every secondary question still has to be set against a keystone that held. The case against the book is a tall stack of fast claims that lose height under a slow read; the case for it is a short list of stubborn, checkable facts. Read both, and decide for yourself.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," pp. 8–27. The section opens (p. 8) with two epigraphs framing the book as all-or-nothing: Ezra Taft Benson ("the Book of Mormon is the keystone of [our] testimony. Just as the arch crumbles if the keystone is removed, so does all the Church stand or fall with the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon") and Jeffrey R. Holland ("a 'sudden death' proposition... Either the Book of Mormon is what the Prophet Joseph said it is or this Church and its founder are false, fraudulent, a deception from the first instance onward"). Page and claim numbers for individual arguments are given in the linked topical articles. ↩︎
Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2012): 78–98. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-history-of-nahom. Documents the three limestone altars (8th–7th centuries BC) recovered near Marib, Yemen, dedicated by a member of the Nihm tribe (NHM), matching the Book of Mormon place "Nahom" (1 Nephi 16:34) at the latitude where the narrative turns eastward (1 Nephi 17:1). ↩︎
On Alma as an attested ancient Hebrew male name (the Bar Kokhba deed of "Alma son of Judah," first published in Yigael Yadin, Bar-Kokhba, 1971), see Neal Rappleye and Allen Hansen, "More Evidence for Alma as a Semitic Name," Interpreter 62 (2024): 415–428. On Sariah in a 5th-century BC Aramaic ostracon from Elephantine, see Neal Rappleye, "Revisiting 'Sariah' at Elephantine," Interpreter 32 (2019): 1–8. ↩︎
John A. Tvedtnes, John Gee, and Matthew Roper, "Book of Mormon Names Attested in Ancient Hebrew Inscriptions," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 9, no. 1 (2000): 40–51. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol9/iss1/11/. A peer-reviewed catalog of sixteen Book of Mormon names attested in ancient Hebrew inscriptions, none of which appear in the English Bible. ↩︎
Sharon Black and Brad Wilcox, "188 Unexplainable Names: Book of Mormon Names No Fiction Writer Would Choose," Religious Educator 12, no. 2 (2011): 119–133. https://rsc.byu.edu/vol-12-no-2-2011/188-unexplainable-names-book-mormon-names-no-fiction-writer-would-choose. Counts 337 proper names in the Book of Mormon, 188 of them unique to it. ↩︎