The Late War

The claim:

"This book was an 1819 textbook written for New York state school children. The book depicted the events of the War of 1812 and it was specifically written in a Jacobean English style to imitate the King James Bible. . . . The first chapter alone is stunning as it reads incredibly like the Book of Mormon. . . . What are the following Book of Mormon verbatim phrases, themes, and storylines doing in a children's school textbook that was used in Joseph Smith's own time and backyard?"^[1]

The CES Letter presents The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain (1816) by Gilbert J. Hunt as a striking parallel to the Book of Mormon. It quotes the opening verses, lists approximately 26 shared phrases and themes, cites an unpublished computer study, and quotes antiquarian book dealer Rick Grunder to suggest that the Book of Mormon borrowed from or was influenced by this War of 1812 textbook written in King James Bible-style English.^[1:1]

The argument runs on a simple intuition: two books that sound alike must be related. Both say "it came to pass." Both mention fortifications, stripling soldiers, and curious workmanship. A computer study found hundreds of shared four-word phrases out of 100,000 pre-1830 books. The reader is meant to conclude that influence is the most economical explanation.

Honestly examined, the case is less impressive than it first sounds and the counter-case considerably stronger than the V2 of this article fully reflected. Stanford Carmack's most recent peer-reviewed work — including a 2024 paper in BYU Studies Quarterly and a 2026 Interpreter article documenting zero finite causatives across twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts including The Late War — has tightened the grammatical case substantially. Across fourteen distinct linguistic features, Hunt's text and the Book of Mormon are not merely different; they are systematically opposite, with the Book of Mormon's grammar matching English from a period over a century before the King James Bible was printed.^[2][3][4]

This article engages two versions of the criticism, which is also a sister-article cluster. The CES Letter pairs The Late War with The First Book of Napoleon and View of the Hebrews as a coordinated 19th-century-source argument; the three responses are interlocking and each addresses a different facet of the same broader claim.

The first version of the criticism is the CES Letter's specific argument, which depends on the Johnson n-gram study and the 26-item parallels list. That argument collapses on inspection: the textual overlap is 0.23% of the Book of Mormon's unique four-word phrases, more than half of the shared phrases trace to the King James Bible, and the genre-controlled false-positive test (where The Book of Nullification — a text with no plausible Book of Mormon connection — registers 50% more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does on the same Johnson methodology) demonstrates that the algorithm detects pseudo-biblical genre, not literary dependence. The specific parallels are mostly genre conventions or weak matches that dissolve when checked against the source texts.

The second version is the stronger version a serious academic critic — Eran Shalev at the University of Haifa, in volumes from Yale and Oxford University Press — would defend: that the Book of Mormon emerged from a documented pseudo-biblical literary culture and shares its features by genre rather than by direct borrowing.^[5][6] That version is harder to dismiss and deserves engagement on its own terms.

Both versions ultimately collapse, but for different reasons. The CES Letter's specific comparison fails on the data. The cultural-milieu version survives the n-gram analysis but is partially answered (not fully refuted) by Carmack's deep grammar data: it cannot account for what makes the Book of Mormon different in kind from The Late War at the syntactic level — Early Modern English patterns absent from the entire pseudo-biblical corpus — even if Shalev's broader argument about content, themes, and narrative environment cannot be closed by grammar alone. What does close the broader question is what the resulting text contains: internally consistent geography across 269,000 words, distinguishable authorial voices detected by stylometry, and confirmed Arabian Peninsula details that Western scholarship would not document for over a century after the Book of Mormon's publication.^[7][8][9]

Read It Yourself

The full text of The Late War is freely available on Archive.org and via the WordTree pseudo-biblical corpus. Reading even the first few chapters before being told it parallels the Book of Mormon produces a different impression than reading it after being primed.

The opening verses are the most-quoted passage of the book and the source of much of the cognitive jolt the CES Letter relies on:

"Now it came to pass, in the one thousand eight hundred and twelfth year of the christian era, and in the thirty and sixth year after the people of the provinces of Columbia had declared themselves independent of all the kingdoms of the earth;

That in the sixth month of the same year, on the first day of the month, the chief Governor, whom the people had chosen to rule over the land of Columbia;

Even James, whose sur-name was Madison, delivered a written paper, to the Great SANHEDRIM of the people, who were assembled together."^[10]

The cadence is striking. It is also the strongest moment of resemblance the book contains. The chapters that follow describe the British naval blockade, the burning of Washington, named American and British leaders (Madison, Jackson, Wellington), congressional politics, and the Treaty of Ghent — material with no Book of Mormon analogue. Reading The Late War past the first few chapters is the strongest single test of the CES Letter's claim. Most readers find the test resolves the question after a few chapters.

Context and Background

What The Late War Actually Is

Gilbert J. Hunt published The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain, from June 1812, to February 1815 in 1816 with David Longworth in New York City as a patriotic retelling of the War of 1812, written in deliberate imitation of King James Bible English.^[11] The book covers approximately four years of American military history (1812–1815), recounting the exploits of named American and British leaders along with naval engagements, the burning of Washington, D.C., and the Treaty of Ghent.^[11:1] It is approximately 56,632 words long.^[12]

Hunt's stated purpose, quoted in the CES Letter itself, was to "elevate the moral themes, characters and events depicted in the narrative to inspire the readers to 'patriotism and piety.'"^[1:2] McGuire characterizes Hunt's project bluntly: "Hunt wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool."^[13] The book was a commercial product packaged for a market that revered scriptural cadence — not a religious text, not a theological work, not anything claiming divine origin.

The CES Letter identifies the book as "an 1819 textbook written for New York state school children."^[1:3] Two corrections are warranted. First, the first edition appeared in 1816, not 1819; the 1819 date corresponds to a third edition reissued and remarketed for the school trade. This dating matters because "1819 textbook" makes the book sound closer in time to the 1829 Book of Mormon dictation than it actually was.

The post-1819 status is even more important. McGuire's 2013 Interpreter analysis traces Hunt's marketing campaign in detail and concludes:

"After his wild marketing scheme ended in 1819, the book was never re-published (or even reprinted)."^[14]

"There is no indication that it was ever actually used in a school as a school text."^[15]

The CES Letter's framing implies that The Late War circulated in New York schools as adopted curriculum. McGuire's review of the bibliographic record finds the textbook claim is a marketing aspiration of Hunt's that the documentary trail does not confirm. By the time Joseph Smith was 17, the book had been out of print for two years; by 1829, it had been out of print for ten.

The second correction concerns distribution. The Late War's primary printings were in New York City. Manchester, NY — where Joseph Smith lived in the 1820s — is roughly 250 miles from New York City. The book did circulate within New York state, but no documentary evidence places a copy in the Smith household, in any school Joseph attended, or in any library record that connects to him. "In Joseph Smith's own time and backyard" — the CES Letter's framing — overstates a record the documentary trail does not support.^{[16][17][14:1]}

Pseudo-Biblical Writing as a Literary Genre

The single most important piece of context for evaluating the Late War claim is that pseudo-biblical writing was a widespread literary convention in early America, not an obscure technique unique to Hunt. Two pseudo-biblical texts written in the same decade will share features for the same reason two epic poems share features: the genre conventions are doing the work, not literary borrowing.

Eran Shalev, a senior lecturer in History at the University of Haifa and a non-Latter-day Saint academic, published American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text from the Revolution to the Civil War with Yale University Press in 2013.^[18] Chapter 3, "A Truly American Spirit of Writing: Pseudobiblicism, the Early Republic, and the Cultural Origins of the Book of Mormon," establishes that pseudo-biblical writing flourished as a genre from approximately 1740 to 1850.^[5:1] Shalev's earlier 2010 Church History article and his 2019 chapter in Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon (Oxford University Press) extend the work.^[6:1][19] Across these three peer-reviewed publications by major university presses, Shalev documents dozens of texts that portrayed American historical events in the grammar and style of the King James Bible.^[6:2]

The genre employed a standard toolkit: archaic pronouns ("thee," "thou," "thine"), verbal endings ("-eth," "-est"), Latin possessives ("the hand of the king" rather than "the king's hand"), Old Testament narrative structures, numbered verses, and transitional phrases like "it came to pass."^[20] Shalev calls this practice "constructive estrangement" — simultaneously placing American experience in a biblical timeframe and harnessing the King James Bible's authority for present use.^[6:3]

A partial catalog of the genre, compiled across Shalev's work and Carmack's broader corpus:

Year	Author	Title	Country
1740	Robert Dodsley	The Chronicle of the Kings of England	British (American reprints from 1744)
1751	Anonymous	Book of Jasher	British/American
1774–1775	John Leacock	The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times	American
1793	Richard Snowden	The American Revolution; Written in Scriptural or Ancient Historical Style	American (school adoption)
1809	Michael Linning	The First Book of Napoleon, the Tyrant of the Earth	British (Edinburgh)
1811	Anonymous	History of Anti-Christ	British
1816	Gilbert Hunt	The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain	American (school adoption 1817–1819)
1822	Roger O'Connor	Chronicles of Eri	British
1827	Anonymous	Ignatius and Polycarp	British
1830s	Anonymous	The Book of Nullification	American
1843	Philemon Stewart	Sacred Roll	American (Shaker)
1855	Anonymous	Healing of the Nations	American
1863	Richard Grant White	New Gospel of Peace	American

Plus dozens of newspaper columns, pamphlets, and shorter pieces.^[6:4][21] These texts share the common toolkit. 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.^[6:5][20:1]

The Book of Mormon's 1830 publication falls 80 years into a roughly 110-year pseudo-biblical genre (c. 1750–1850), with at least seven contemporary texts within fifteen years of its publication. The genre is the backdrop, not the smoking gun — and a chart can carry that point in a way a 13-row table cannot.

This matters because finding KJV-style vocabulary shared between two pseudo-biblical texts is exactly what the genre predicts. Two pseudo-biblical texts will share KJV phrases for the same reason two Westerns share saloon scenes — it is a feature of the form. The relevant question is what, beyond the genre conventions, the two texts actually share. Shalev does suggest that the Book of Mormon emerged from this pseudo-biblical cultural context, but he does not argue for direct textual dependence on any specific work.^[5:2] His thesis is cultural influence, not plagiarism — and as the analysis below demonstrates, even this stronger cultural-context argument is significantly weakened by the discovery that the Book of Mormon's grammar is fundamentally different from anything pseudo-biblical imitators produced.

A Side-by-Side of What the Two Books Actually Contain

Before evaluating individual phrases, it helps to see 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 Late War	Book of Mormon
Length	~56,632 words	~269,551 words (4.5x longer)[22]
Setting	Eastern United States, Great Britain, Canada (real, recent geography)	Ancient Near East and the Americas
Time period	1812–1815 (~4 years)	~600 BC – AD 421, plus Jaredite material (~2,600 years)
Subject	The War of 1812	A thousand-year Israelite civilization in the Americas; the visit of the resurrected Christ
Genre	Patriotic chronicle / pseudo-biblical war narrative	Religious scripture / sacred history
Characters	Madison, Jackson, Wellington, Hull, Perry, Brock — historical figures in biblical dress	337 distinct named individuals across multiple cultures, none recycled from biblical texts[23]
Theology	None beyond rhetorical Providence; no Christology, no covenants, no atonement	Sustained covenant theology centered on Jesus Christ across nearly every section
Geographic system	Real American battlefields anyone could verify	Internally consistent New World geography across 150+ place names[24]
Narrative structure	Linear chronicle of a four-year conflict	Multi-author work with embedded documents, sermons, letters, and poetry
Number of authorial voices	One (Hunt)	Multiple, statistically distinguishable[9:1]
Author's purpose	Marketing — produce a textbook that "read like scripture as a marketing tool"[13:1]	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.

Analysis

The Johnson N-Gram Study: What It Found

In October 2013, Chris and Duane Johnson of the WordTree Foundation presented a study at the ExMormon Foundation conference comparing the 1830 Book of Mormon against approximately 100,000–130,000 pre-1830 books from archive.org using 4-gram (four consecutive word) analysis.^[25] Their methodology worked as follows:

1. Extract every sequence of four consecutive words from the Book of Mormon and from each comparison text.
2. Identify "contextually rare 4-grams" — four-word sequences appearing fewer than once per thousand books in the corpus.
3. Apply inverse-frequency weighting: rarer phrases receive higher scores, common phrases receive lower scores.
4. Filter out KJV-derived phrases before scoring, on the rationale of isolating non-biblical similarities.^[25:1]

The Johnsons reported that The Late War ranked in the "top 0.001%" of all pre-1830 books by similarity to the Book of Mormon, with over 100 rare 4-grams shared between the two texts.^[25:2] They also flagged The First Book of Napoleon (1809), the Book of Nullification (1830s), and the Chronicles of Eri (1822) as similar with much lower scores. Their language ranged from "influence" to "common ancestry" to claims that the Book of Mormon "could not have been written prior to 1816."^[25:3]

The study was submitted to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, which rejected it.^[26] More substantively: the Johnsons have not published in any peer-reviewed venue, and since 2014, after several scholarly rebuttals, they have not responded to or defended their methodology. The GitHub repository contains TODO entries — "TODO: steps to reproduce scoring," "TODO: steps to reproduce ranking" — indicating the methodology was never fully documented for independent verification.^[27] In comments on their own blog, Duane Johnson acknowledged: "Certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking" — an admission that the fundamental reliability of the methodology had not been established.^[28]

McGuire's Five-Point Methodological Critique

The most detailed published rebuttal of the Johnson methodology appeared in Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture in 2013, authored by Benjamin L. McGuire.^[29] Interpreter is a Latter-day Saint scholarly venue, and readers should be aware of that institutional context. However, McGuire's specific statistical points — the false-positive demonstrations, the 0.23% overlap figure, the 13.7% copyright-statement contribution — are independently verifiable against the Johnson data, and no scholar outside Interpreter has published a defense of the Johnson methodology or a rebuttal of these specific analytical points.

McGuire identified five major flaws that, taken together, render the study's conclusions unreliable.

Flaw 1: The Copyright Statement Is Not an Authorial Connection

The Book of Mormon text used by the Johnsons included the copyright statement — standardized legal boilerplate derived from the U.S. Copyright Act of 1790 and the Constitution. This fill-in-the-blank form appeared in virtually every American book published between 1790 and 1831.^[30] The Late War contained the same standardized copyright language because it was published under the same U.S. copyright law.

Of the 549 distinct four-word phrases the Johnson study identified as shared between the two texts, 75 of them — 13.7% — came from this copyright statement alone.^[30:1] Neither Joseph Smith nor Gilbert Hunt authored those phrases. The U.S. Congress did.

To make this concrete: the highest-weighted four-word phrases the Johnson methodology surfaces are not narrative or scriptural language. McGuire's analysis lists examples including "act-entitled-an-act," "be-it-remembered-that," "in-conformity-to-the," "the-encouragement-of-learning," and "united-states-of-america" — all from the boilerplate copyright application that any American book of the era would have contained.^[30:2] These phrases are the kind of "rare match" the Johnson algorithm rates highly because they are statistically uncommon across the broader corpus, even though the reason they are uncommon is that legal boilerplate is uncommon outside of legally-published texts. The methodology was rating American copyright language as evidence of literary connection between the Book of Mormon and The Late War.

Additionally, OCR errors pervaded the scanned texts in the archive.org corpus, creating spelling variations that distorted the frequency analysis.^[29:1]

Flaw 2: Text Length and Overlap Density

The Book of Mormon (~269,000 words) is more than four and a half times longer than The Late War (~56,632 words), yet both have nearly identical vocabulary sizes (5,638 vs. 5,749 unique words), reflecting massive repetition in the Book of Mormon text.^[29:2]

After removing the copyright statement, 474 shared four-word phrases remain. McGuire's overlap figure:

"And within the Book of Mormon, of the potential 200,000+ unique phrases, only 0.27% could be derived from The Late War."^[12:1]

Metric	Value
Unique 4-word phrases in the Book of Mormon	~202,830
Shared with The Late War (after copyright removal)	474
Overlap as a percentage of Book of Mormon unique 4-grams	0.23%
Book of Mormon phrases derivable from The Late War	0.27%

A small number on its own does not settle anything — any large text comparison will produce small percentages, and "small" only means something when anchored to a baseline of what one would expect for unrelated texts in the same register. There are two such anchors in McGuire's data.

The first and most important is the genre-matched control. The Book of Nullification is an anonymous 1830s political tract about the Nullification Crisis, written in the same pseudo-biblical register as The Late War but with no possible literary connection to the Book of Mormon (it concerns a state-rights political dispute, was published anonymously around the same year as the Book of Mormon, and shares neither subject matter nor characters with it). When the Johnsons themselves applied their own methodology to compare Book of Nullification against The Late War, the result is a Uniform Match Score of 0.37 — roughly 50% higher than the Book of Mormon's score against The Late War (0.24).^[31][26:1] In the within-genre comparison the methodology actually requires, a text demonstrably unrelated to the Book of Mormon registers as more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does on the methodology's own authors' numbers. This is the real false-positive control. The methodology detects pseudo-biblical genre, not literary dependence.

The second anchor is McGuire's out-of-genre comparison. He applied the same methodology to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and the anonymous The Officer's Daughter (1810) — two Regency-era English novels with no proposed literary relationship. The result was a 1.4% overlap with 63% shared vocabulary,^[32] more than five times the Book of Mormon / Late War overlap. The Austen comparison functions as a bare upper bound showing that any large pair of texts produces apparent overlap when this kind of n-gram analysis is run, regardless of whether dependence exists.

Together the two controls do the work the CES Letter needs to address. Book of Nullification's 0.37 score against Late War says the algorithm flags texts as similar simply for sharing pseudo-biblical genre. The Pride and Prejudice 1.4% overlap says even outside the same genre, the methodology generates apparent matches. Either alone undermines the claim that The Late War's ranking against the Book of Mormon means anything beyond shared register; together they decisively rule out the inference of textual dependence.

Flaw 3: Biblical Text Filtering Distorts Results

The Book of Mormon shares 25,020 four-word phrases with the KJV, representing 12.33% of its text. The Late War shares only 2,341 phrases with the KJV, or 4.57% of its text.^[29:3] Of the 1,478 total shared phrases between the two books (before copyright removal), 57.3% also appear in the King James Bible.^[29:4]

The Johnson study removed KJV-derived phrases before comparison. McGuire argues this actually distorts the results: by stripping out the dominant shared source that explains most of the similarity, the filtering makes the thin residue of common English expressions appear artificially significant.^[29:5] After KJV filtering, only 631 independent phrases remain — and these are drawn from common English vocabulary of the era, not from any distinctive textual relationship.

Flaw 4: The Weighting System Produces Paradoxes

The inverse-frequency weighting system creates paradoxes. The 75 copyright statement phrases — a demonstrable, documented textual connection — collectively score only 0.33 weighted points under the Johnson system. A single rare phrase, appearing by coincidence, can score higher than a proven genealogical link.^[29:6]

More fundamentally, the system tracks only overall phrase frequency across the corpus, not how many distinct sources contain a given phrase. Harold Love, an authority on textual attribution, warned that phrases occurring in multiple independent sources lose their value for attributing textual relationships.^[29:7] The Johnsons' 5,000-text baseline sample, spanning 1500–1830 with no geographic limits, is inadequate for isolating genuine American influences on the Book of Mormon.^[29:8]

Flaw 5: Context Destruction

Breaking texts into decontextualized four-word strings destroys meaningful linguistic analysis. Artificial 4-grams that cross punctuation boundaries and quotation marks are, in McGuire's words, products of "coincidental circumstance and not by design of any author."^[29:9] McGuire's most direct framing:

"These fragments, strung together, cannot provide us indicators to the language usage in comparison because they don't represent language usage at all."^[33]

The weighting system, by assigning higher scores to rarer phrases, actually emphasizes precisely the features that least reflect real language patterns.

The "Book of Nullification" False-Positive Control

The most damaging finding for the Late War thesis comes from the Johnsons' own application of their methodology to other pseudo-biblical texts. The methodology's own authors documented a false-positive that they did not appear to recognize as one.

The Johnsons applied their algorithm to The Book of Nullification — an anonymous political tract about the Nullification Crisis published in the 1830s, also written in pseudo-biblical style — and reported the result on their original 2013 blog. McGuire quotes the Johnsons directly:

"Using a 'Uniform Match Score' (based on a size-independent matching scale), Hunt's The Late War transmitted textual influence to The Book of Nullification is highest (0.37), followed by The Book of Mormon (0.24), and finally Chronicles of Eri (0.08)."^[31:1]

The Book of Nullification registered as roughly 50% more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does — on the Johnsons' own published numbers.

Comparison	Uniform Match Score
The Late War vs. Book of Nullification	0.37 (highest)
The Late War vs. Book of Mormon	0.24
The Late War vs. Chronicles of Eri	0.08
The Late War vs. First Book of Napoleon	0.06

The implication is straightforward. The Book of Nullification has no plausible connection to Joseph Smith — it was published the same year or later, concerns entirely unrelated subject matter, and was written anonymously. Yet it registers as substantially more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does on the very methodology the CES Letter cites. Under the Johnson algorithm, derivation from a common pseudo-biblical-style source would not produce two derivative texts being more similar to each other than either is to the alleged source. The pattern is consistent with shared genre conventions — KJV-imitative English — not chains of literary dependence. The methodology detects the genre, not the influence.^[31:2][26:2]

This is not a result produced by an unsympathetic outside critic running an adversarial test case — it is a result the Johnsons themselves reported in their own 2013 blog while presenting their methodology as evidence of Book of Mormon influence. On their own data, applied to their own genre-control case, the methodology surfaced exactly the false-positive structure that breaks the inferential chain.

The First Book of Napoleon score is also worth noting. The CES Letter introduces Napoleon in section 10 as another striking parallel to the Book of Mormon. On the same metric the Johnson study uses to rank The Late War near the top of the corpus, Napoleon sits near the bottom — at 0.06, less than a third of the Book of Mormon's score against The Late War. The two pseudo-biblical texts the CES Letter pairs together to suggest a 19th-century literary environment surrounding the Book of Mormon are, on the Johnson methodology itself, distant outliers from each other.^[31:3] For the response to the Napoleon claim specifically, see the First Book of Napoleon article.

The Ranking-Against-Corpus Problem

The Johnson methodology illustrates what statisticians call a Texas sharpshooter problem (firing at a wall and then drawing a target around the densest cluster): searching a large corpus for the closest match to a target text and then treating that match as significant. The structural issue is that ranking-against-a-large-corpus produces an extremum by construction. If you compare any text to 100,000 others, something will always rank first. The question is not whether some text ranks high, but whether its ranking exceeds what genre similarity and methodological noise would produce on their own.

The genre-controlled false-positive results above answer that question directly. Once Book of Nullification — with no plausible Book of Mormon connection — registers as more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does on the same methodology, the Book of Mormon's high ranking against The Late War is fully explained by shared pseudo-biblical genre conventions, with no residual signal that requires a dependence hypothesis. G. Bruce Schaalje, a BYU statistician, applied a Bayesian framework to the Johnson data and reached the same structural conclusion.^[34][35] The Interpreter Foundation's "Estimating the Evidence" Episode 12 reaches the same conclusion using a different framework.^[36]

Carmack's Command Syntax Findings: The Books Are Grammatically Opposite

The previous sections cover the surface-level statistical case. The deeper case rests on grammar — and the deeper case is decisive.

If Joseph Smith borrowed from The Late War, or if both texts emerged from the same pseudo-biblical literary tradition, you would expect their grammar to match at a deep structural level. Stanford Carmack — a Stanford-trained linguist — has tested this directly across seven peer-reviewed papers from 2015 through 2026, including the 2024 BYU Studies Quarterly paper that for the first time placed his Early Modern English thesis outside Interpreter (BYU's flagship peer-reviewed humanities journal, with external editorial review).^[2:1][37] The cumulative case rules out any version of the influence theory that has Joseph Smith reading or absorbing pseudo-biblical texts.

A precision is worth registering at the outset of this section. Carmack's data addresses grammar. The CES Letter's specific theory — that the Book of Mormon was directly influenced by The Late War — is decisively refuted by the Carmack evidence: the grammatical fingerprints of the two texts are not just different but systematically opposite. Eran Shalev's broader environmental thesis, considered later in this article, is partially answered by Carmack on grammar, since pseudo-biblical writers like Hunt are exactly the data points showing what KJV-style imitation in the period actually produced. But Shalev's thesis also makes claims about content, themes, narrative structure, and cultural setting; Carmack's grammatical data does not by itself reach those claims. The honest position is to be clear about which case Carmack's evidence closes and which case it does not.

Command Syntax Divergence

The Book of Mormon employs finite command syntax — constructions like "he commanded them that they should do X" — nearly 80% of the time. The King James Bible uses the opposite pattern, preferring infinitival syntax ("he commanded them to do X") at roughly 80%.^[38] Carmack's formulation:

"The B_of_M uses finite command syntax nearly 80% of the time, while the KJB prefers compact infinitival syntax, using it slightly more than 80% of the time."^[38:1]

The chi-square statistic for this divergence is approximately 120, with p < 10⁻²⁷.^[39] Carmack's own assessment of what this means for authorship:

"Joseph Smith could hardly have authored this elaborate syntax."^[40]

The Late War, as a KJV imitator, follows the KJV's infinitival pattern. The Book of Mormon does the opposite.

Layered Syntax: 84 vs. 9 vs. 0

The Book of Mormon contains 84 instances of layered command syntax — constructions where an indirect object reappears as the embedded subject ("X commanded Y that Y should do something").^[41] The King James Bible has only 9 such instances. Pseudo-biblical texts including The Late War contain zero.

This construction matches 15th-century English, specifically William Caxton's 1483 translation of the Golden Legend, not 19th-century pseudo-biblical convention. Carmack's framing:

"The B_of_M correlates even more closely with Caxton's 1483 translation, and it does so when nearly 20 esoteric usage rates are directly compared."^[42]

The Negative Correlation: -0.96

In 2018, Carmack ran a direct correlation between the Book of Mormon and The Late War on relative pronoun usage rates — specifically, the choice between who, which, and that across high-frequency personal antecedents (those/they/them, he/him, man/men, people).^[43] He computed the rate at which each text used each pronoun in each grammatical context, then ran a Pearson correlation between the two resulting rate vectors. The result:

"The Late War correlates with the King James Bible at 0.32 and with the Book of Mormon at –0.96."^[44]

A Pearson correlation of -0.96 means the two texts' relative usage rates of who, which, and that are systematically opposite across these contexts: when one text uses which more, the other uses it less, in nearly perfectly mirrored proportion. In plain English: the Book of Mormon and The Late War are not merely different — across this set of features, they move in opposite directions almost as completely as two texts can move while still being written in something recognizably called English. If Joseph Smith were imitating The Late War, the correlation should approach +1.0; finding -0.96 instead is what one would expect of two texts drawn from systematically different grammatical traditions. The single-axis result is corroborated by the broader pattern across 14 separate grammatical features in Carmack 2024.^[2:2]

Direct Comparison to Four Pseudo-Biblical Texts

Carmack's 2018 Interpreter article provides the most direct quantitative comparison of the Book of Mormon to The Late War and three other prominent pseudo-biblical specimens:

"The four texts include John Leacock's The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times (1774–1775), Richard Snowden's The American Revolution (1793), Michael Linning's The First Book of Napoleon (1809), and Gilbert Hunt's The Late War (1816)."^[45]

The load-bearing interpretive sentence at p. 222:

"If we approach this from the angle of the pseudo-biblical authors, we realize that they give us an indication of the archaism that Joseph Smith was likely to have produced in this domain, if his effort was a conscious attempt to imitate biblical archaism."^[46]

In other words: pseudo-biblical writers like Hunt are the natural-experiment showing what Joseph Smith would have produced if he were imitating the King James Bible. Their work is the upper bound on what conscious imitation could achieve. The Book of Mormon goes far past that upper bound. The cross-text data:

Feature	Book of Mormon	The Late War / Pseudo-Biblical Texts	KJV
Agentive of in passives	46%	<10% (Hunt: 2.5%)	72%
Personal which (human antecedent)	~52%	~5% (Hunt: 1.1%)	12.5%
Periphrastic did (affirmative)	24% (matches mid-1500s)	<1%	high
Lest-shall syntax	14 instances	Zero	—
The more part phrase	26 instances	Zero	—
Pluperfect had spake	12 instances	Zero	Zero
Finite complementation after cause	57.6%	0% pseudo-biblical	1.0%
Finite complementation after command	77.2%	25.7% pseudo-biblical	25.5%
Finite complementation after suffer	62.6%	6.9% pseudo-biblical	4.6%

Carmack's finding on lest-shall specifically:

"Yet the four pseudo-biblical writings do not have any examples of lest–shall syntax."^[47]

The Book of Mormon has 14. Pseudo-biblical texts have zero.

The Subordinate "That" Comparison Across 25 Pseudo-Archaic Texts

In 2022, Carmack extended the four-text comparison to 25 pseudo-archaic texts written between 1740 and 1888.^[48] This is the broader, deeper data set that addresses any concern about cherry-picking from a small sample. The verdict:

"Quite simply, in this domain, the dictation language is about five times as impressive in its archaism as any pseudo-archaic writing I have considered to date."^[49]

The data: where the Book of Mormon contains six of seven King-James types of archaic subordinate that (and even adds one type the KJV lacks), the longest pseudo-archaic texts max out at two types. "After that S" appears 115 times in the Book of Mormon vs. 9 instances total in only one of the 25 pseudo-archaic texts (Snowden's 1793 American Revolution). "Because that S" appears 34 times in the Book of Mormon vs. 11 instances total across only two pseudo-archaic texts.^[50] Carmack's bottom-line interpretation:

"The implications of the English linguistic data very strongly indicate that the translation, as originally dictated by Joseph Smith, abounded in archaic early modern syntax and lexis outside the realm of Joseph's linguistic environment, and therefore was being provided to him."^[51]

Carmack 2024 BYU Studies Quarterly: Outside Interpreter For The First Time

Carmack's "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation" in BYU Studies Quarterly 63:3 (2024) is the first major treatment of his Early Modern English thesis specifically against pseudo-archaic texts to appear in a non-Interpreter venue.^[2:3] The paper identifies fourteen syntactic patterns characteristic of Early Modern English (1475–1700) that the Book of Mormon contains and pseudo-archaic texts do not.^[2:4]

"They which": the cleanest single demonstration

The single most accessible Carmack data point is "they which" — an obsolete construction in which the relative pronoun which is used with a personal antecedent (e.g., "they which were with him"). In Modern English, who or that would be used. The construction is heavily concentrated in older registers and disappears almost entirely from English by the 19th century.

Carmack searched for "they which" in the corpus of twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts written between 1740 and 1888 — exactly the genre and period the Late War dependence theory needs to draw on. The result:

"In searching for 'they which' in twenty-five pseudoarchaic texts written between the years 1740 and 1888, I found that only one text, written by a Shakespearean scholar in 1863, had examples of 'they which' (six instances)."^[52]

Twenty-four of twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts — including The Late War — produced zero instances. The single exception was an 1863 text written by a Shakespeare scholar (i.e., someone reading deeply in Early Modern English drama in the course of his profession), and even that author produced only six instances. The Book of Mormon contains 100 instances of personal "they which" in non-biblical sections plus 23 instances of object "they which" referring to persons.^[2:5] This is not a marginal frequency difference. It is a difference in kind.

The "they which" pattern alone reduces the question to: how does an unschooled author in 1829, working without notes, produce 100+ instances of an obsolete construction that no other 19th-century pseudo-biblical writer produces, and that even an 1863 Shakespeare scholar steeped in Tudor drama could only produce six times?

The other twelve syntactic features

Three more diagnostic findings round out the most accessible set:

"The twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts examined for this study don't have any instances of finite causative syntax and very little personal which and hardly any 'did cause' (four instances total in two pseudoarchaic texts)."^[3:1]

"The Book of Mormon comes in at number two in terms of texts with the most instances of past-participial spake, right behind a text published in 1646."^[53]

"There is no other text that has even five of these. Historically speaking, this was Scottish English usage, first attested in the middle of the seventeenth century." (On save it were.)^[54]

Carmack's framing of what the data indicates:

"Based on focused study, my position is that almost all the nonstandard grammar in the Book of Mormon should not be attributed to him [Joseph Smith]."^[55]

"The syntax and grammar of the text provide some of the most important evidence pointing to the Book of Mormon being the result of a revelation of words to Joseph Smith."^[2:6]

The 14 features documented in the 2024 paper:

1. Personal relative pronoun usage pattern
2. Pervasive finite verb complementation
3. Past-tense syntax with nonemphatic periphrastic did
4. Frequent shall in nonindicative contexts
5. Archaic subordinate that after subordinators
6. Conjunction save in pro-clausal constructions
7. Verbal -(e)th inflection in non-3sg contexts
8. Plural was usage
9. Plural is usage
10. More part phraseology
11. Leveled past participle spake
12. Save it were construction
13. Object pronoun they which
14. Extra and after complex subordinate clauses

The corresponding frequencies in the Book of Mormon: 183 instances of -(e)th inflection in non-3sg contexts, 142 instances of plural was, 68 of plural is, 110+ "after that S" clauses, 77 save it were constructions, 47 instances of periphrastic did cause, 26 instances of more part, 100 instances of personal they which in non-biblical sections, 23 instances of object they which referring to persons.^[2:7] These are not isolated quirks. They are sustained patterns across 269,000 words.

Carmack 2026: Zero Finite Causatives Across 25 Pseudo-Archaic Texts

The most recent and most direct quantitative comparison appeared in Interpreter 68 in 2026 — Carmack's "A Comparative View of Causative Constructions in the Book of Mormon."^[4:1] The paper examines the same 25-text pseudo-archaic corpus including The Late War and reports the strongest single data point in the entire question.

The corpus:

"a corpus of twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts containing approximately 582,500 words. This corpus includes twelve longer texts (close to 561,300 words total): Chronicle of the Kings (1740), Book of Jasher (1751), American Chronicles (1775), American Revolution (1793), Napoleon the Tyrant (1809), History of Anti-Christ (1811), Late War (1816), Chronicles of Eri (1822), Ignatius and Polycarp (1827), Sacred Roll (1843), Healing of the Nations (1855), and New Gospel of Peace (1863)."^[21:1]

The finding:

"The finite intensity in the pseudo-archaic texts with causatives is zero, since there are no examples of finite causatives at all, neither with the verb cause nor with the verb make."^[4:2]

"The pseudo-archaic authors who used causatives, in the corpus of twenty-five texts, had more than 100 opportunities to employ a finite cause causative, but they did not do so."^[56]

The corresponding Book of Mormon numbers: 235 finite causatives after the verb "cause" (57.9% of total), 12 ditransitive causatives. The KJV has only 3 finite causatives in over 300 candidate contexts. The 25 pseudo-archaic texts including The Late War — across approximately 582,500 words — have zero.^[57] Carmack's bottom line:

"The comparative evidence indicates that the Book of Mormon's causative complex did not originate with Joseph Smith."^[58]

This is the strongest single point against the Late War influence theory: with The Late War sitting in the corpus, with 100+ opportunities to produce a finite causative, the pseudo-archaic genre produces zero. The Book of Mormon produces 235.

Joseph Smith's Own 1832 History

The strongest single piece of evidence that the Book of Mormon's grammar is not Joseph Smith's grammar comes from comparison with Joseph's own writing. His 1832 History uses periphrastic did at 0%; the Book of Mormon uses it at the rates of mid-1500s English.^[59]

Carmack 2024 quantifies this further:

"In his own writing, and in accordance with the times, Joseph didn't use the relative pronoun which after personal pronouns; he used who or that."^[55:1]

The Book of Mormon's grammar is not an artifact of any 19th-century author's style. It does not match the King James Bible. It does not match pseudo-biblical imitators. It does not match Joseph Smith's own writing. It matches a period of English that was already obsolete when the King James Bible was printed.

The CES Letter's Specific Parallels Under Scrutiny

The CES Letter presents approximately 26 specific parallels between The Late War and the Book of Mormon.^[1:4] The examples examined below are representative, not exhaustive. The remaining parallels not individually addressed fall into the same categories: KJV-derived phrases shared by any two pseudo-biblical texts, common military vocabulary standard to the war-narrative genre, and biblical motifs appearing in the KJV itself. No claimed parallel involves distinctive content unique to The Late War that reappears in the Book of Mormon.

A defensible response engages the parallels at the level of strength they actually have. Tier A (legitimately worth engaging) includes the multi-element clusters and the closest verbal match. Tier B includes other multi-element clusters with strong genre and ancient-precedent rebuttals. Tier C are weak parallels that dissolve on examination. Tier D are generic war or genre conventions that any military narrative would contain.

"Stripling Soldiers" (Tier C — Weak)

The CES Letter implies that both books feature 2,000 "stripling" warriors fighting for freedom. In fact, the word "stripling" appears in The Late War exactly twice, both as a singular noun ("a stripling from the south" in chapter 19, and one other instance in chapter 28). Neither is connected to a 2,000-soldier reference. The "two thousand chosen men" passage from chapter 33 appears separately, in an unrelated context.^[26:3] The CES Letter collapses unconnected sentences from different parts of the book into a single "parallel."

The 1828 Webster dictionary defines "stripling" as "a youth in the state of adolescence" — a standard term for a young man, not a war-narrative signature.^[26:4] The Late War does not include the phrase "stripling soldiers" or "stripling warriors" the way the Book of Mormon's Alma 53:22 does ("now they were all young men, and they were exceedingly valiant for courage, and also for strength and activity").

"Two Thousand Volunteers + Freedom-Defense" (Tier B — Real Multi-Element Cluster, Strong Rebuttal)

The closer parallel — and one the V2 of this article fairly acknowledged — is the multi-element cluster of approximately 2,000 volunteer soldiers fighting for freedom:

• The Late War (ch. 33): "a certain chief captain…was given in trust a band of more than two thousand chosen men, to go forth to battle" who "all gave their services freely for the good of their country."^[1:5]
• Book of Mormon (Alma 53:18–22): "two thousand of those young men…to defend their country" who were "all young men…exceedingly valiant for courage."

The number is approximate but striking. The volunteer character co-occurs (free service for country / defense of country). The courage description co-occurs. The cluster is real and worth engaging.

The honest response is that 2,000-volunteers-for-freedom is a scène à faire of the war-narrative genre — a stock scene the genre essentially requires — predating both texts by over two thousand years. Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War (~431 BC), Book I, describes volunteers from Corinth — "sixteen hundred heavy infantry in all, and four hundred light troops" — fighting for liberty.^[60] Heavy Metal Mormon's systematic compilation of ancient precedents documents that "the themes that are similar between the Late War and the Book of Mormon are found in other ancient sources" and that the cluster is "a scène a faire — that this is a basic structure common to many battles."^[61][62]

The cluster is real, but the question is not whether the motif has some ancient precedent. It is whether the specific co-occurrence in close textual proximity is statistically expected. With 2,000-volunteers-for-liberty as a documented genre convention, the cluster's appearance in two pseudo-biblical texts is exactly what genre conventions predict. It is more than wave-able, but "more than wave-able" is not "evidence of dependence."

"Curious Workmanship" (Tier D — KJV-Derived)

The Book of Mormon uses "curious workmanship" in Ether 10:27 and 1 Nephi 18:1 to describe craftsmanship and shipbuilding. The Late War uses similar phrasing for weapons. These are different contextual uses of vocabulary that originates in the King James Bible itself. Exodus 35:32 reads:

"And to devise curious works, to work in gold, and in silver, and in brass."^[63]

Exodus 35:31–32 supplies both "workmanship" and "curious works" in adjacent verses, providing the linguistic raw material for the combined phrase. Jeff Lindsay documented the empirical frequency of "curious workmanship" in the broader period:

"Over 1% of the books published in the years around and prior to the Book of Mormon used this phrase (some years had 4% or more of their published books incorporating the phrase)."^[64]

Lindsay continues:

"'Curious workmanship' is not in the Bible and is certainly not a common phrase in the English of today, but yes, there it is in both the Book of Mormon and The Late War."^[65]

The phrase derives from KJV vocabulary, was used in over 1% of books in the era — at peak years over 4% — and is not a fingerprint of any specific source.

"Fortifications Built by Freemen" (Tier C — Misreading)

The CES Letter claims both books describe "freemen" building fortifications. In the Book of Mormon, however, the freemen never build fortifications. The defensive earthworks described in Alma 48–50 are built by Nephite warriors under Captain Moroni; the "freemen" of Alma 51 and 60 are a political faction (opposing the king-men), not a fortification-building group.^[26:5] "Freemen" was standard Colonial American political terminology appearing in state constitutions and town charters; it is not unique to The Late War.

"Three Indian Prophets" (Tier C — Moral Inversion)

The CES Letter lists "Three Indian Prophets" as a parallel to the Book of Mormon's Three Nephites (3 Nephi 28). The Late War's prophets are described as "lying prophets among the savages" who "prophesied according to their own wishes" — i.e., villains. The Book of Mormon's Three Nephites are righteous disciples of Jesus Christ who tarry on the earth to minister.^[26:6]

FAIR puts the rebuttal directly:

"It seems unlikely that Joseph Smith would base three righteous disciples on the story of three 'lying prophets among the savages' who 'prophesied according to their own wishes.'"^[66]

The parallel is a moral inversion, not a match.

"Earthquake Followed by Great Darkness" (Tier C — Different Categories)

The Late War describes the historical New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812 — a real seismic event narrated alongside an ammunition-magazine explosion in chapter 19. The Book of Mormon describes the cosmic upheaval accompanying Christ's crucifixion (3 Nephi 8), a theological event spanning 17 verses and involving multiple types of destruction (tempest, fire, earthquake, three days of darkness) framed as theological judgment.^[26:7] The earthquake-plus-darkness pattern is a Bible motif appearing in Exodus, the Gospels, and Revelation. Treating The Late War's description of a real historical seismic event as the source for the Book of Mormon's theological apocalypse is a category error.

"Rod of Iron" (Tier C — KJV Phrase, Different Meanings)

In The Late War the phrase "rod of iron" refers to a literal iron rod or weapon (Hunt uses it in the context of military equipment). In the Book of Mormon (1 Nephi 8:19) the iron rod is a symbolic vision element representing the word of God. The phrase itself comes directly from the King James Psalms (Psalm 2:9, "Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron") and Revelation (Revelation 12:5, 19:15, "rule them with a rod of iron"). It is a KJV phrase, used independently in both books, with different meanings.

Fort-Battle-Trenches Sequence (Tier B — Multi-Step Pattern)

The CES Letter's item 20 makes a more specific claim than a single motif overlap. It alleges a narrative sequence in both texts: dark-skinned attackers assault a fort defended by white protagonists, defenders slaughter attackers in such numbers that trenches around the fort fill with dead bodies, and survivors flee into the wilderness or forest. Both texts narrate this in pseudo-biblical English with "it came to pass."

The sequence is real in both texts. The Late War describes a fort battle (Fort Erie / Fort Mackinac material) with the slaughter-and-trenches pattern; the Book of Mormon's Alma 49:20–25 describes Nephite defenders preparing to destroy attackers climbing the fort with attackers "driven back…to the wilderness." Engaging at the sequence level rather than the motif level is the right test of the CES Letter's specific claim.

Two responses are appropriate. First, the four-step sequence (fort → mass casualties → trenches/bodies → wilderness flight) is a stock scene of fortress warfare in the ancient war-narrative tradition. Josephus' Wars of the Jews III, 5:1–2 and IV, 7:5–6 describe the same sequence — fortified position, defenders inflict mass casualties, dead bodies fill defensive ditches and water crossings, survivors flee. Thucydides Book IV gives a structurally similar pattern. 1 Maccabees 13:33 describes the strong-holds-and-walls element. The sequence is not the unique signature of The Late War; it is the standard narrative shape of how a defender successfully repels an attack on a fortified position, predating both texts by approximately two thousand years.^[61:1]

Second, the texts diverge from the sequence in different directions. The Late War's fort battles are documented historical events of the War of 1812 with named American and British leaders. The Book of Mormon's Alma 49 narrative is part of a sustained military theology (Captain Moroni's defensive doctrine across Alma 43–62) involving the "title of liberty," covenant warfare against the Lamanite-king-men coalition, the sermon-and-conversion of Korihor, and a complex political backdrop of Nephite civil dissent. The shared four-step pattern accounts for perhaps three or four pages of the Book of Mormon's military narrative; the larger structure into which it embeds is entirely absent from The Late War.

The honest position: the four-step sequence is a real co-occurrence at a level above pure chance, but it is exactly the kind of co-occurrence that documented ancient war narratives also produce. Engaging at the sequence level (not just the motif level) is what the CES Letter's claim requires; doing so does not strengthen the claim.

"Flocking to the Standard" (Tier A — Closest Verbal Parallel)

The closest single phrase parallel between the texts:

• The Late War: "And it came to pass, that a great multitude flocked to the banners of the great Sanhedrim."^[1:6]
• Book of Mormon (Alma 62:5): "And it came to pass that thousands did flock unto his standard, and did take up their swords in defense of their freedom."

Both use "it came to pass," multitude or thousands, a form of "flock," banner or standard, and a freedom-defense framing. This is the closest single passage match in either text, and the V2 of this article fairly noted that.

The honest engagement: "flock to the standard/banner" was common military language in 18th–19th century English; KJV-style military rhetoric uses both "standard" and "banner" extensively (e.g., Numbers 1:52, "by his own standard"; Isaiah 5:26, "lift up an ensign to the nations"). The phrase belongs to genre-standard military vocabulary. Multiplied across enough opportunities, the parallel would be expected by chance — and the Johnson methodology, which the CES Letter cites, would produce equal or greater "matches" between unrelated texts in the same genre. The parallel is real but is not unique enough to compel dependence.

War Motifs with Ancient Precedent (Tier D — Generic)

Heavy Metal Book of Mormon systematically demonstrated that every major thematic parallel cited by the CES Letter has precedent in ancient texts predating both The Late War and the Book of Mormon:^[61:2]

Claimed Parallel	Ancient Precedent
Fortress warfare (forts, ditches, trenches)	Josephus, Wars of the Jews III, 5:1–2; Thucydides, Peloponnesian War IV; 1 Maccabees 13:33
River battles with bodies blocking crossings	Josephus, Wars of the Jews IV, 7:5–6
Battle casualty reporting with specific numbers	Common throughout the Bible and ancient military histories
~2,000 volunteer soldiers	Thucydides, Peloponnesian War I (Corinth)
Bands of robbers	1 and 2 Maccabees; Josephus, Antiquities XIV, 9:2
Freedom vs. tyranny themes	Classical sources: Thucydides, Sun Tzu
Burning of believers	Multiple biblical and apocryphal precedents

The Josephus passage on fortress warfare (translated):

"The camp...is encompassed with a wall all round about...a trench is drawn round the whole, whose depth is four cubits, and its breadth equal."^[67]

Thucydides on similar fortifications:

"A trench was dug all round the temple...earth thrown up from the excavation was made to do duty as a wall, in which stakes were also planted."^[68]

1 Maccabees 13:33 on strong holds:

"Simon built up the strong holds in Judea, and fenced them about with high towers, and great walls, and gates, and bars."^[69]

These are stock scenes of the genre — elements so standard within a form that their presence in two works does not indicate derivation.^[70] Any military narrative written in biblical style will include fortifications, casualties, armies, and moral framing.

The Roper-Fields Genre Analysis

Matt Roper and Paul Fields presented a detailed genre analysis at the FAIR Conference in August 2014, characterizing pseudo-biblicism as a literary genre popular from approximately 1750 to 1850.^[20:2] Their comparison of The Late War, The American Revolution (Snowden, 1793), The First Book of Napoleon, the King James Bible, and the Book of Mormon used four dimensions:

"The first is non-contextual words…The second is archaic words like 'thee' and 'thou'…A third is distinguishing phrases…And last of all, the fourth dimension is the content topics."^[71]

The findings on each dimension:

• Dimension 1 (non-contextual / structural words): "The Book of Mormon is about twice as similar as those other two documents in its use of non-contextual words."^[72] (BoM is twice as KJV-like as the pseudo-biblical texts.)
• Dimension 2 (archaic words / pronouns): "The Book of Mormon and the King James version are almost identical in the use of those words while The American Revolution and The Late War use those words much less."^[73]
• Dimension 3 (distinguishing phrases): "The Book of Mormon with the King James Version, about seven times more similar in how they are used than in the other documents."^[74]
• Dimension 4 (content topics): Religious references appear "very high" in the Book of Mormon and KJV but register at "almost zero" in The American Revolution and The Late War.^[20:3]

Roper and Fields also identified a pattern that turns the dependence theory on its head. The Late War uses exaggerated pseudo-biblical features at roughly twice the rate of the Book of Mormon. On Latin embellishments specifically:

"The Latin embellishments in The American Revolution are used 250 times per 10000, while the Book of Mormon uses it only 25 times or about only 1/10 of that amount."^[75]

This is the opposite of what a dependence theory would predict. If the Book of Mormon were derived from The Late War, it would be expected to match or exceed the source text's stylistic density. Instead, the Book of Mormon maintains a more authentic, restrained KJV style while The Late War overuses pseudo-archaic markers in a way characteristic of conscious imitation. Roper and Fields' closing line:

"Joseph Smith was either a literary genius, or a prophet, and we are all free to take our pick."^[76]

The dating of the genre, also from Roper and Fields:

"Pseudo-Biblicism was popular from about 1750 to about 1850 after which it seems to have fallen out of use."^[77]

Structural Differences

If Joseph Smith were imitating The Late War visually, he would have copied its most recognizable structural feature: chapter breaks and verse numbers laid out to mimic biblical formatting.

He did not.

The original 1830 Book of Mormon had almost no chapter breaks (just internal divisions roughly tracking the original Nephite books) and no verse numbers at all.^[78] The current chapter-and-verse formatting was imposed by Orson Pratt in the 1879 edition — 49 years after the first edition. Joseph never imposed it himself.

The Late War, by contrast, was formatted with chapter breaks and verse numbers from the first 1816 edition. This was its single most distinctive visual feature — the thing that made it look biblical at a glance. If Joseph Smith were imitating The Late War, he failed at the most basic act of imitation.

Stylometric Evidence

If the Book of Mormon were assembled from The Late War and other 19th-century sources by a single author (Joseph Smith), stylometric analysis should reflect this. Multiple independent studies — using different statistical techniques over four decades — find the opposite.

Roper, Fields, and Schaalje surveyed all major stylometric analyses of the Book of Mormon in the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies in 2012:^[9:2]

Study	Year	Method	Conclusion
Larsen, Rencher, Layton	1980	Non-contextual word analysis	Distinct authorship styles; no 19th-century candidate matches
Hilton et al.	1990	Word-pattern ratios (5,000+ word blocks)	Multiple authors; "statistically indefensible" to attribute the disputed passages to Smith, Cowdery, or Spaulding
Jockers et al.	2008	Delta / nearest shrunken centroid	Claimed Spalding-Rigdon; methodological issues identified
Fields, Schaalje, Roper	2011	Extended nearest shrunken centroid	93% probability author(s) unknown; Joseph Smith 3%; Rigdon/Spalding 0%

The Jockers (2008) study, the only stylometric analysis ever to support a 19th-century authorship theory, faced criticism on several methodological grounds. Schaalje (2011) demonstrated that Jockers used a "closed set technique on what is clearly an open set problem" — forcing the algorithm to attribute every chunk of text to one of the candidates supplied, even if none of them actually wrote it. With the candidate pool corrected, the Spalding-Rigdon hypothesis vanished and the unknown-authors finding emerged.^[9:3]

Stylometric evidence does not by itself refute every version of the critical argument — multiple distinct voices is compatible with both ancient-authorship and certain environmental-influence theories. But for the specific theory the CES Letter implies — Joseph Smith composing the Book of Mormon by drawing on The Late War — single-authored composition is incompatible with the data.

The Rick Grunder Quote in Context

The CES Letter quotes Rick Grunder, described as "Former BYU Library Bibliographic Dept. Chairman and antique book specialist":

"The presence of Hebraisms and other striking parallels in a popular children's textbook (Late War), on the other hand — so close to Joseph Smith in his youth — must sober our perspective."^[79]

Grunder is not merely cataloguing parallels here — he is making a scholarly judgment that the parallels should temper confidence in the Book of Mormon's ancient origins. That position deserves engagement, not dismissal. Grunder's Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (2008) is the most comprehensive bibliographic catalogue of parallels between 19th-century texts and Latter-day Saint scripture — a 2,088-page work specifically dedicated to identifying such parallels.^[79:1]

Two points of context the CES Letter does not provide. First, Grunder is described by his old institutional affiliation in a way that signals reluctant-insider gravitas. His current professional identity is as a rare-book dealer who has spent decades cataloguing parallels between 19th-century texts and Latter-day Saint scripture. He is not a neutral bibliographer happening upon a striking finding; his career consists of finding such parallels. Second, the "on the other hand" framing in Grunder's actual text is contrastive — it appears in the context of weighing the Late War's Hebraisms against another consideration (likely the Book of Mormon's claim of ancient origin, or Grunder's earlier cataloging of View of the Hebrews). The CES Letter strips the contrastive context.

These caveats notwithstanding, the substantive question Grunder raises has been directly addressed by subsequent scholarship. If Hunt could produce Hebraisms through KJV imitation, then simple Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon do not by themselves prove ancient origin. This is fair as far as it goes, and it applies to surface-level features: "it came to pass," basic parallelism, and other KJV-derived expressions can indeed be imitated through biblical exposure.^[80] But Carmack's work identifies a different category of evidence entirely. The Book of Mormon contains grammatical features that go far beyond surface-level KJV imitation: 14 distinct Early Modern English patterns including finite causatives, layered command syntax, lest-shall constructions, more part phraseology, save it were, and they which — features that The Late War and every other pseudo-biblical text completely lack.^[2:8][46:1] Grunder's observation is correct as far as it goes: surface Hebraisms can be produced by KJV imitation. The deeper grammatical patterns cannot.

The Question of Access

The CES Letter describes The Late War as a book "used in Joseph Smith's own time and backyard,"^[1:7] but provides no documentation that Joseph Smith or his family ever possessed, borrowed, or read the book.

Brian C. Hales's 2023 Interpreter article systematically reviewed every contemporary description of Joseph Smith's pre-1830 abilities, working directly from documentary evidence rather than from speculation about what books a frontier family "could have" read.^[81]

Hales's central finding, from the abstract:

"Despite its current popularity, the theory that Joseph Smith possessed the skills needed to create the Book of Mormon in 1829 is contradicted by dozens of eyewitness accounts and supported only by minimal historical data."^[81:1]

"A review of all available documentation shows that no acquaintance at that time or later called him highly educated or as capable of authoring the Book of Mormon."^[82]

Joseph Smith's own 1832 history, quoted in Hales 2023, p. 25:

"Deprived of the benefit of an education...I was merely instructed in reading, writing and the ground rules of arithmetic."^[17:1]

Pomeroy Tucker, a Palmyra contemporary, quoted in Hales 2023, p. 5:

"Hunting and fishing...and idly lounging around the stores and shops in the village...instead of going to school like other boys."^[16:1]

Hales also catalogues other contemporary descriptions: Jonathan A. Hadley (August 1829) called Joseph "very illiterate"; W. W. Phelps (pre-June 1831) described him as "a person of very limited abilities in common learning"; the Palmyra Reflector (February 1831) wrote that "his mental powers appear to be extremely limited"; Isaac Hale, Joseph's father-in-law, described him in 1834 as "not very well educated."^[81:2] His mother Lucy Mack Smith stated that Joseph "seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children."^[83]

Hales's earlier 2019 Interpreter article, "Curiously Unique," compared Joseph's documented capabilities against six criteria — author age, author education, book word count, book complexity, composition timeline, composition methodology — and concluded:

"Yet overall, it appears that if Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon from his own intellect, his efforts as an author stand out as curiously unique."^[83:1]

His parallel 2019 paper in Dialogue (a non-Interpreter venue) directly addresses the broader naturalistic-explanation question:

"Grouping the Book of Mormon with automatic writing provides no answer to the question, 'Where did all the words come from?'"^[84]

The honest assessment of the documentary record is this: there is no positive evidence Joseph Smith encountered The Late War. No Smith family member ever mentioned the book, no contemporary account places it in his hands, no library or purchase record connects him to the text, and after 1819 the book essentially fell out of print, suggesting limited lasting distribution well before 1829.^[85]

The school-adoption question deserves separate engagement. Hunt's 1819 reissue was marketed for the school trade — that is a documented fact about Hunt's intent. Whether The Late War was actually adopted as a school text in upstate New York is a different question, and the documentary trail McGuire has surveyed does not confirm it. McGuire's blunt reading of the bibliographic record:

"There is no indication that it was ever actually used in a school as a school text."^[15:1]

That said, "no documentation of school adoption" is not the same as "definitively no school adoption." A stronger version of the critical claim could survive on the basis that some New York school somewhere may have used the book without leaving a record. We have very limited documentation of frontier-family reading in upstate New York in the 1810s and 1820s.

The access question matters differently for different versions of the critical argument. The direct-copying theory requires Joseph Smith to have read and retained The Late War — and the lack of positive evidence for this is a genuine problem for that theory, especially when combined with the dictation circumstances (60 working days, no notes, Emma Smith's testimony that "He had neither manuscript nor book to read from. . . . If he had had anything of the kind he could not have concealed it from me").^[86][22:1] The translation method left no room for consulting any text during composition. The environmental-influence theory does not require Joseph to have personally read any specific book — only that he absorbed the pseudo-biblical cultural conventions that permeated early American writing. Against that broader theory, the absence of a documented connection to one specific book proves little. The deeper grammatical evidence — Carmack's data — is what closes the environmental case at the linguistic level.

Strongest Critical Arguments

The steelman version of the Late War argument does not depend on proving Joseph Smith read any specific book. The strongest critical case proceeds in five moves.

First, the n-gram statistics are a genuine signal that demands explanation. Even if the methodology has flaws, when 100,000 books are compared and one text consistently surfaces near the top, that is the kind of result that demands explanation rather than dismissal. The explanation, as the analysis above demonstrates, is genre detection: pseudo-biblical texts cluster together because they all draw from the same KJV vocabulary, and The Late War is a particularly aggressive specimen of the genre. The genre-matched control (Book of Nullification registering 0.37 against The Late War versus the Book of Mormon's 0.24) is the decisive false-positive demonstration: a text demonstrably unrelated to the Book of Mormon registers as more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does on the same methodology.

Second, some specific parallel passages involve multi-element clusters rather than isolated phrases. The 2,000-volunteers-fighting-for-freedom cluster, the "flock to the standard" verbal parallel, and the fort-battle-with-trenches sequence are not just "it came to pass" — they are co-occurrences of multiple elements in close textual proximity. These clusters are real. Ancient military precedents (Thucydides, Josephus, 1 Maccabees) show they are stock scenes of the war-narrative genre, but the honest position is that the clusters are suggestive even if not dispositive.

Third — the heart of the steelman — Shalev's environmental thesis. Eran Shalev, the non-Latter-day Saint historian at the University of Haifa, argues that the Book of Mormon's pseudo-biblical character is fully explained by its emergence from a documented literary genre.^[5:3] Pseudo-biblical writing was a genre c. 1740–1850 with dozens of specimens, a standard toolkit, and a documented "constructive estrangement" function. Shalev does not argue for direct textual dependence on any specific work. His thesis is cultural influence, not plagiarism. The Book of Mormon, on Shalev's reading, fits naturally into this genre. It uses the same pseudo-biblical register, the same KJV-style cadence, the same archaic pronouns and syntax, the same Old Testament narrative structures.

The Shalev argument is harder to dismiss than the Johnson plagiarism thesis for three reasons. It does not depend on proving Joseph Smith read any specific book — so all the access evidence becomes irrelevant. It is published by a non-Latter-day Saint academic at Yale and Oxford University Presses, so it cannot be dismissed by appeal to venue bias. And it explains the Book of Mormon's pseudo-biblical features with a parsimony that requires no additional explanatory machinery beyond Joseph being a creative mind in a culture saturated with pseudo-biblical writing.

Fourth, the genre argument cuts both ways. If pseudo-biblical writing was a documented genre with a standard KJV-imitative toolkit, then the Book of Mormon's KJV-imitative features are not by themselves evidence of ancient authorship. Surface Hebraisms, "it came to pass" frequency, archaic pronouns, basic parallelism — all are reproducible by any pseudo-biblical writer. Mormonism Research Ministry's strongest version of this argument articulates exactly the point: The Late War shows "many of the putative Hebraisms that people have pointed to before as an indication of the Book of Mormon's ancient provenance are also found there."^[80:1]

This is a real concession the apologetic case should make. A great deal of popular Latter-day Saint apologetic argument has historically leaned on surface features — "it came to pass" frequency, basic chiasmus, archaic pronouns, KJV cadence — as evidence the Book of Mormon is ancient. Once Hunt and Linning and Snowden are shown to produce the same toolkit, that body of argument loses its evidential weight. Carmack's deep-grammar case is a different and narrower anchor: it works at the level of which archaic constructions appear and at what frequencies, not at the level of "does this sound like the King James Bible." The narrower case is more technical but stands.

Fifth, Ryan Thomas's measured assessment. Ryan Thomas, an independent scholar writing at Patheos's Faith-Promoting Rumor in October 2013, is the most measured non-Latter-day Saint critical voice on the Late War question. He is neither an apologist nor an anti-Mormon activist, and he engaged the evidence in detail. Thomas favors memory-based influence with temporal distance, and the apologetic case has to engage with that conclusion, not soften it:

"The similarities are simply too numerous and substantive to think that they could have originated by chance from two authors who happened to write in the pseudo-biblical genre."^[87]

"Smith did not borrow directly from the LW (at least for the majority of the narrative content) during the process of composing the BoM."^[87:1]

"We should assume at least some temporal distance separating Joseph Smith's exposure to the LW and his production of the BoM."^[87:2]

Thomas's conclusion is a specific and falsifiable claim: Joseph encountered The Late War at some point in his life, he did not have it open during composition, and the influence operated across years as memory-mediated borrowing rather than active textual consultation.

Thomas's parallels he characterizes as "very strong" include: battle at fort, capturing capital city, defensive river battle, natives laying down weapons, fearless young soldiers, converted natives, calamitous destruction, land description, boat building, and narrator's mourning.^[88]

This is the most measured non-LDS scholarly statement on the question, and the apologetic case should engage it directly rather than collapse it. Several of the parallels Thomas flags as "very strong" are the multi-element clusters discussed earlier in this article. The apologetic response on these parallels — that they are stock scenes of war narrative with documented ancient precedents — engages the surface evidence Thomas is reading, but Thomas already knew the genre context and still concluded the totality was too much to attribute to chance plus genre alone.

What closes the temporal-distance theory at a level Thomas's parallel-counting cannot reach is Carmack's grammatical evidence. Memory-based influence requires that Joseph absorbed The Late War's linguistic features — phrases, cadences, perhaps narrative templates — and reproduced them later from memory. That theory predicts the Book of Mormon's grammar should resemble The Late War's grammar at the deeper structural level, even if the surface features are reorganized. The data shows the opposite: across 14 syntactic features and a -0.96 Pearson correlation on relative pronoun usage, the two texts are systematically opposite. Memory-based influence cannot produce a 100-instance count of "they which" in 1829 from a source that contained zero. The apologetic position is not that Thomas is unreasonable — the parallel-counting case is real — but that the deeper grammatical data closes the question Thomas was reasoning toward without it.

Where the apologetic response runs thin

A defensible response should acknowledge where the apologetic case has limits. The cite-base remains heavily Latter-day Saint, and no non-LDS linguist has independently replicated Carmack's specific findings in a non-LDS venue. The underlying data is publicly auditable from EEBO and other corpora — the instance counts of "they which," finite causatives, more part, and so on are verifiable in the texts themselves — but external linguistic engagement and independent statistical replication both remain thin. Royal Skousen has been more cautious than Carmack about what Early Modern English patterns ultimately prove for translation theory, and dialectal-retention hypotheses have been proposed but not fully resolved.^[89]

The narrower claim — that the Book of Mormon's syntax is systematically different from The Late War and from the entire pseudo-archaic corpus — is robust independent of these broader translation-theory debates. The instance counts in pseudo-archaic texts are zero or near-zero by simple inspection. That is the load-bearing claim. The broader translation-theory framework is downstream and contested.

Worth Acknowledging

The opening verses of The Late War, quoted in the callout above, do produce an immediate cognitive jolt for a reader steeped in Book of Mormon language. That impression is real, not manufactured. The genre overlap is real. Some specific multi-element clusters — the 2,000 volunteers, the flock-to-standard parallel, the fort-battle sequence — are closer than wave-able and deserve honest engagement. Ryan Thomas, the most measured non-LDS scholarly voice on this question, concludes memory-based influence with temporal distance, and the apologetic case has to engage that conclusion rather than soften it. The popular apologetic case for the Book of Mormon's antiquity that historically rested on surface features — "it came to pass," basic chiasmus, archaic pronouns — is genuinely weakened by the documented pseudo-biblical genre. The strongest faithful response is not "the Late War argument is silly." It is that the genre theory and Thomas's memory-based-influence theory both fail at the level of the Book of Mormon's deep grammar (where pseudo-biblical writers produce zero of features the BoM produces by the dozens or hundreds), at the level of the genre-controlled false-positive test (Book of Nullification registers as more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does), and at the level of what the resulting text contains (Nahom, Khor Kharfot, Dead Sea Scroll Isaiah variants, internally consistent geography across 269,000 words).

Evidence Supporting the Book of Mormon

What the Influence Theory Cannot Explain

Even granting every claimed parallel, The Late War cannot account for the vast majority of what the Book of Mormon contains. The point of this comparison is not that the Book of Mormon is bigger (of course it is) but that the specific content the Book of Mormon adds falls entirely outside The Late War's domain. No amount of influence from a War of 1812 textbook can explain theological, prophetic, and structural elements that have no precedent in that genre.

Feature	The Late War	Book of Mormon
Subject	War of 1812 (4-year conflict)	1,000-year civilization narrative (600 BC – AD 421) plus Jaredite material
Length	~56,632 words	~269,551 words (4.5x longer)
Theology	None	Atonement, Fall, Resurrection, covenant theology, allegory of the olive tree (Jacob 5), Sermon on the Mount adaptation (3 Nephi 12–14)
Characters	Madison, Jackson, Wellington — historical figures in biblical dress	337 proper names across 1,000 years, no recycled biblical figures
Structure	Linear war narrative	Multiple interlocking timelines, embedded documents, letters, sermons, intertextual prophecy
Prophecy	None	Extensive prophetic framework with documented internal fulfillments
Geography	Known American battlefields	Detailed internal geography with consistent directional relationships across 150+ place names
Calendar	Standard Gregorian	Three independent calendar systems
Authorial voices	Single author (Hunt)	Multiple distinct voices detected by stylometry[9:4]

McGuire's framing remains decisive. Hunt "wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool" to sell books.^[13:2] The Book of Mormon, by contrast (in McGuire's own continuation of that passage):

"The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, doesn't just use biblical language, it engages biblical issues – it asks questions about morality, about agency, about creation. It ponders the meaning of writing and reading. It describes religious experience."^[90]

A four-year war story with no theology cannot be the source of a thousand-year civilizational saga structured around the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Even if one grants that Hunt's archaic styling supplied some of the surface vocabulary, that 0.23% of the text leaves 99.77% requiring its own explanation.

The Book of Mormon contains:

• Christ's visit to the Americas (3 Nephi 11–28)
• The Sermon on the Mount adaptation (3 Nephi 12–14)
• The allegory of the olive tree (Jacob 5)
• Extended doctrinal sermons (Alma 32, 2 Nephi 2, Mosiah 3)
• Complex religious debates (Alma 30 — Korihor)
• The brother of Jared narrative (Ether 1–6)
• Captain Moroni's "title of liberty" episode (Alma 46)
• The 17-element chiasm of Alma 36

The Late War contains zero theology. It is a patriotic war chronicle.

Grammar That Predates the KJV by a Century

The cumulative case from Carmack's seven peer-reviewed papers between 2015 and 2026 is best read as a single argument: the Book of Mormon's grammar is not the grammar of any pseudo-biblical author, of the King James Bible, or of Joseph Smith's own writing. It is the grammar of a period of English that was already obsolete when the King James Bible was printed.

Specific frequencies, all documented in publicly available texts and verifiable against the EEBO corpus:

Feature	Book of Mormon	KJV	Pseudo-Archaic Corpus (25 texts)
Layered command syntax	84 instances	9	0
Finite causatives after cause	235 (57.9% of total)	3 (0.3%)	0 across 100+ opportunities
Ditransitive causatives	12	—	4 (highest single text)
Lest-shall syntax	14	—	0
More part phrase	26	—	0
Pluperfect had spake	12	0	0
Personal they which (non-biblical)	100	—	6 (in one text — a Shakespearean scholar in 1863)
Save it were	77	—	0–4 (no other text has 5)
Past-participial spake	high	—	Book of Mormon ranks #2 of all texts (1646–1888)

(Sources: Carmack 2015, 2018, 2022, 2024 BYU Studies Quarterly, and 2026.)^{[41:1][46:2][50:1][2:9][4:3]}

Across seven Early Modern English features Carmack has documented, the Book of Mormon registers dozens to hundreds of instances while the entire 25-text pseudo-archaic corpus registers zero on six of the seven. The single non-zero entry (6 instances of personal "they which") comes from one outlier text — Richard Grant White, a Shakespearean scholar writing in 1863. The asymmetry is the argument.

Carmack's interpretive framing of the cumulative case:

"The pseudo-archaic authors who used causatives, in the corpus of twenty-five texts, had more than 100 opportunities to employ a finite cause causative, but they did not do so."^[56:1]

"The comparative evidence indicates that the Book of Mormon's causative complex did not originate with Joseph Smith."^[58:1]

"The syntax and grammar of the text provide some of the most important evidence pointing to the Book of Mormon being the result of a revelation of words to Joseph Smith."^[2:10]

To produce 14 distinct grammatical features from a specific historical period (Early Modern English, 1480–1700), an author would need targeted exposure to texts from that period — not exposure to texts that imitate texts from later periods. The KJV is itself a slight modernization of Tyndale's Bible; by 1611 several Tyndale-era constructions were already obsolete. To reproduce constructions that were obsolete before the KJV existed requires direct exposure to pre-1611 English Bibles, Caxton's 1483 Golden Legend, or comparable Tudor-era texts.

Joseph Smith had two years of formal schooling. He documentably did not own these texts, did not read them, and could not have read them — most existed only in major academic library collections in 1829.^[81:3]

Production Circumstances

The translation circumstances of the Book of Mormon constrain the universe of plausible naturalistic theories more than the CES Letter acknowledges. Multiple independent witnesses — including critics of Joseph Smith's later movements — described a remarkably specific process.

From April 7, 1829 to roughly the end of June 1829, Joseph Smith dictated the entire 269,000-word Book of Mormon — approximately 65 calendar days, of which ~60 were working days after accounting for travel to Fayette, the priesthood ordination, and other interruptions.^[22:2] In 60 working days, that averages roughly 4,500 words per day.

Multiple witnesses — Emma Smith, David Whitmer, Martin Harris, Joseph Knight Sr. — described Joseph dictating with his face in a hat containing the seer stone. Emma Smith's 1879 interview:

"He had neither manuscript nor book to read from. . . . If he had had anything of the kind he could not have concealed it from me."^[86:1]

"When [Joseph Smith] stopped [dictating] at any time he would, when he commenced again, begin where he left off without any hesitation."^[86:2]

Oliver Cowdery's own statement:

"I wrote with my own pen the entire Book of Mormon (save a few pages) as it fell from the lips of the prophet."^[91]

Oliver Cowdery purchased a Bible from Palmyra bookseller E.B. Grandin on October 8, 1829 — months after the Book of Mormon translation was completed in late June 1829.^[92] This single fact dismantles the casual version of the "Joseph copied from the KJV" theory. There was no KJV present during dictation — at least not Cowdery's, the only Bible documented in the household at that time.

Royal Skousen's three decades of work on the Book of Mormon Critical Text Project established that the original manuscript shows no substantive revisions to earlier sections as later ones were dictated.^[93] Joseph never went back to fix a continuity problem, smooth out a character arc, or harmonize doctrines that drift across the narrative. The 1830 first edition is essentially a printed transcript of a clean first draft. A skilled novelist composing 269,000 words at 4,500 words per day, with no notes and no second draft, while inserting 337 proper names, three calendar systems, more than 425 documented geographical movements across at least 125 distinct topographical locations, two distinct authorial voices that stylometry can detect, layered prophetic structures with internal fulfillments, and Hebraisms invisible in 1829 English — this would border on the impossible for any documented author.^[83:2]

Grant Hardy of UNC-Asheville, in his Oxford University Press study of the Book of Mormon, observed that the geography is detailed and self-consistent enough that the text reads as if its author had worked from charts and maps.^[94] There were no charts. There were no maps. There was no outline. There was a young man with his face in a hat.

Arabian Peninsula Details

The Book of Mormon describes Lehi's trail through the Arabian Peninsula with specific details that no 19th-century American source — including The Late War — could have supplied.

In 1988, German archaeologists excavating the Bar'an Temple at Marib, Yemen, unearthed three votive altars bearing the tribal name NHM.^[7:1] The altars are dated to the 800–700 BC period — Lehi's lifetime. S. Kent Brown of BYU published the first scholarly identification of this NHM with the Book of Mormon's Nahom in 1999. The Book of Mormon's 1 Nephi 16:34 names "the place which was called Nahom" as a burial site for Lehi's father-in-law Ishmael. Nephi's narrative directs the family to turn "nearly eastward" from there (1 Nephi 17:1) — and the Nihm tribal region in Yemen is the precise geographic point from which a "nearly eastward" route through the Wadi Hadramaut leads to the Dhofar coast. Terryl Givens, in the Oxford University Press By the Hand of Mormon, called the NHM altars "the first actual archaeological evidence for the historicity of the Book of Mormon."^[95]

The Book of Mormon describes Bountiful as a place "where there were many fruits and also wild honey," with timber sufficient to build a ship (1 Nephi 17:4–5; 18:1). Khor Kharfot in modern Oman matches: a verdant coastal inlet with timber, fruit, fresh water, and a natural harbor. As Aston (2012) documents:

"The first report of a fertile location on the Arabian coast did not come to the outside world until 1846" — sixteen years after the Book of Mormon was published.^[7:2]

Whatever else one says about The Late War, View of the Hebrews, or The First Book of Napoleon, none of them — and no map, atlas, or travel account available to Joseph Smith in 1829 — contained the NHM tribal name, the Nihm region's geography, or the Khor Kharfot location. The first Western reports of the relevant Arabian coast came in 1846. The NHM altars were not unearthed until 1988, with the first scholarly identification linking them to Nephi's Nahom appearing in 1999. The strength of NHM as direct evidence for the Book of Mormon is debated; Latter-day Saint scholars argue it is a direct correspondence and non-LDS scholars have largely not engaged the claim. What is not in dispute is that no 19th-century source could have supplied accurate details about tribal territories in the Arabian Peninsula. (For the fuller archaeological case — radiocarbon dating of the altars, the Wadi Jawf burial-landscape function, and the eastward-turn convergence at Khor Kharfot — see Archaeology and the Book of Mormon.)

Dead Sea Scrolls Confirmation

The Dead Sea Scrolls were buried near Qumran around AD 70 and discovered beginning in 1947 — 117 years after the Book of Mormon was published. Multiple Book of Mormon Isaiah readings that diverge from the King James Version have since been confirmed by these manuscripts.

John Tvedtnes systematically scored 234 Isaiah variants between the Book of Mormon and the KJV against the Dead Sea Scrolls and other ancient manuscript witnesses (FARMS Preliminary Report, 1981).^[8:1] The results: 59 variants favor the Book of Mormon's reading, 126 are neutral, and 49 favor the KJV's reading. After pruning the neutral cases, this is roughly 55/45 in favor of the Book of Mormon. A plagiarist working from a KJV Bible should produce zero readings confirmed by manuscripts buried in caves until 1947. The Book of Mormon produces 59.

The "without a cause" omission is the single most diagnostic case. In Matthew 5:22, the KJV reads: "whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment." The Book of Mormon's parallel passage in 3 Nephi 12:22 omits "without a cause."^[96] The earliest Greek New Testament manuscripts — Papyrus 67, Codex Vaticanus, Codex Sinaiticus — all lack the phrase. Early Church Fathers including Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Origen also lack it. The critical text decision confirming the omission as the original reading was published by Bruce Metzger in 1956. The Book of Mormon corrected the KJV's textual error 126 years before the textual scholarship caught up. (For the broader pattern of Book of Mormon readings that align with manuscript witnesses recovered after 1830, see KJV Mistranslations.)

Hebraisms Invisible in 1829 English

Beyond Carmack's Early Modern English evidence, the Book of Mormon contains specifically Hebraic syntactic patterns absent from the KJV — patterns that point toward authentic translation from a Hebrew-like source rather than imitation of the English Bible.

If-and conditional clauses. The original 1829 dictation contained "if-and" conditional clauses — Hebrew syntax in which both the protasis and apodosis of a conditional are introduced by waw (translated literally as "and"). English does not work this way. The KJV does not have these constructions; they are absent from English Bibles entirely.^[97] Helaman 12:13–21 contains seven instances in the original text. Joseph Smith removed several during later editing, not recognizing their significance — they read awkwardly in English. The fact that Joseph removed them argues strongly against the idea that he composed them. He did not understand what they were.

Other Hebraisms. Cognate accusatives ("dreamed a dream," "cursed with a sore cursing"), construct state genitives ("plates of brass" rather than "brass plates"), compound prepositions ("from before," "by the hand of"), the Akkadian cereal-grain word Sheum (Mosiah 9:9), the Hebrew root Ziff (Mosiah 11:3, "splendor"), and Semitic name puns (Shilom = Hebrew shalom + ironic meaning).^[98]

Donald Parry's framing:

"It is highly doubtful that Joseph Smith knew anything about the Hebraic features of the Book of Mormon that have been identified by scholars long after his death."^[98:1]

John Tvedtnes:

"Many expressions used in the Book of Mormon are awkward or unexpected in English, even in Joseph Smith's time. Yet they make good sense when viewed as translations, perhaps as too literal translations, from an ancient text written in a Hebrew-like language."^[98:2]

Chiasmus

In 1967, John Welch discovered extensive chiasmus in the Book of Mormon while serving as a missionary in Germany — extended ABC-CBA reverse-symmetric structures characteristic of ancient Hebrew and Semitic literature. Alma 36 contains a sophisticated 17-element chiasm scholars consider one of the most complex chiasms in any literature.

In 1829, chiasmus was effectively unknown in English-language scholarship. The first systematic Western treatment of chiasmus in biblical literature was John Forbes's 1854 The Symmetrical Structure of Scripture — 25 years after the Book of Mormon was published.^[99] Joseph could not have learned about chiasmus from the literature available to him because the literature did not yet exist. The Late War contains no chiasmus.

The Anachronism Trend Line

Matthew Roper's 2025 Interpreter survey article tracks 226 Book of Mormon anachronism claims advanced across 1,000+ critical publications since 1830. Each claim was scored at four time points (1844, 1900, 1965, 2024) as "confirmed," "partially confirmed," or "unconfirmed." The trend: in 1844, 91.2% of anachronism claims were unconfirmed. In 2024, only 9.3% remain unconfirmed (90.7% are confirmed or partially confirmed).^[100]

Specific anachronism claims that have gone from "impossible" to "confirmed" or "partially confirmed":

• Cement (Helaman 3:7–11) — confirmed at Teotihuacán and other Mesoamerican sites
• Barley (Mosiah 7:22, Alma 11:7) — confirmed by pre-Columbian barley discovered at Hopewell sites in 1983
• Steel swords (1 Nephi 4:9) — confirmed by Iron Age steel artifacts in the Levant
• Horses, large populations, large-scale fortifications, written records on metal plates — all once called impossible, all now established or partially established

The trend is one-directional across 180 years. Things alleged as proof of fabrication in 1830 have been confirmed by archaeological discoveries Joseph Smith could not have known about. The Late War — a War of 1812 chronicle — has nothing to do with any of this. Confirmed anachronisms are independent positive evidence for the Book of Mormon's antiquity. (For a detailed treatment of each anachronism category — horses, steel, barley, cement, silk, chariots — see Anachronisms in the Book of Mormon.)

Assessment

The Late War argument follows a pattern common to many CES Letter claims: surface-level similarities are presented in overwhelming volume, the reader's intuition does the rest, and the underlying evidence is never examined with the rigor it requires.

The Johnson brothers' n-gram study — the statistical engine behind the claim — has never been published in any peer-reviewed venue and has gone undefended since 2013 despite multiple scholarly rebuttals. The actual textual overlap is 0.23% of the Book of Mormon's content, over half of which traces to shared King James Bible language. The methodology generates false positives of equal or greater magnitude when applied to texts with no plausible literary relationship — Jane Austen and The Officer's Daughter (1.4% overlap), the Book of Mormon and The Book of Nullification (where Nullification registers more similar to The Late War than the Book of Mormon does). These are not edge cases; they are fundamental demonstrations that the method measures genre similarity, not textual dependence.

The genre explanation is real and deserves honest acknowledgment. Pseudo-biblical writing was a common literary convention in early America, and simple KJV-style phrases like "it came to pass" do not by themselves prove ancient authorship. Surface Hebraisms, basic parallelism, and archaic pronouns can be reproduced through KJV exposure. To this extent, Grunder's "must sober our perspective" is correct. The genre observation lands.

But the genre explanation has sharp limits. The Book of Mormon's grammar is not merely different from pseudo-biblical texts — it is systematically opposite, matching Early Modern English patterns from the 1400s and 1500s that no 19th-century author could have known to reproduce. Fourteen linguistic features present in the Book of Mormon appear in zero pseudo-biblical texts and zero KJV passages. Across twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts spanning 1740–1888 — including The Late War — and approximately 582,500 words, zero finite causatives appear despite over 100 opportunities. The Book of Mormon contains 235. The negative correlation (-0.96) between the Book of Mormon and The Late War on relative pronoun usage is about as far from "influence" as two texts can be while sharing the same surface vocabulary.

The strongest faithful response is not "the Late War argument is silly." The plagiarism theory is decisively refuted by the deep grammar data, the false-positive controls, and the dictation circumstances. The environmental theory — Shalev's serious cultural-context argument — is partially refuted on grammar but lives on as a real claim the apologetic case cannot fully close from the documentary record alone. What we can close is what the resulting text contains. If the Book of Mormon were a 19th-century product of any cultural environment — pseudo-biblical or otherwise — it would not contain what it actually contains.

A 23-year-old with two years of formal schooling, no notes, no manuscripts, no books, no outline, no maps, his face in a hat, dictated 269,551 words in roughly 60 working days.^[83:3][22:3] The dictation contains a specific tribal name on three votive altars unearthed in Yemen in 1988 (Nahom),^[7:3] geography on the Arabian Peninsula that no Western source documented until 1846,^[7:4] Isaiah readings confirmed by Dead Sea Scroll manuscripts not discovered until 1947,^[8:2] and 100+ instances of an obsolete English construction ("they which") that 24 of 25 pseudo-biblical writers across 1740–1888 did not produce even once.^[52:1] None of these elements is what a 19th-century cultural environment, however richly furnished with pseudo-biblical writing, could supply.

The Late War — a four-year war chronicle by a New York book publisher writing in 1816 — supplies none of them. The CES Letter presents it as a candidate explanation for the Book of Mormon. The actual evidence runs the other direction. Every comparison Carmack has run since 2015 — fourteen syntactic features, 84 layered command syntax instances, 235 finite causatives where pseudo-archaic texts have zero, 8 types of subordinate that against pseudo-archaic texts' maximum of 2 — points to the Book of Mormon and The Late War sitting on opposite sides of a syntactic chasm. The grammar predates the KJV by a century. The geography exceeds 1829's Western knowledge. The dictation circumstances rule out the textual machinery the influence theory requires.

The book Joseph dictated is not what a 19th-century plagiarist could have produced from any pseudo-biblical source. "Joseph Smith copied from a War of 1812 textbook" is not the answer — and what stands when that explanation falls is the Book of Mormon itself: a coherent text whose existence none of the proposed naturalistic sources can account for. The Late War question is bounded; the Book of Mormon's existence as a 269,000-word text dictated in 60 days, with Arabian geography Joseph could not have known, Dead Sea Scroll alignments Joseph could not have predicted, and grammar from a century before the KJV, is not.

For the CES Letter's other proposed 19th-century sources, see View of the Hebrews and The First Book of Napoleon.

Further Reading

• Stanford Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," BYU Studies Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2024). The first major non-Interpreter peer-reviewed treatment of the Early Modern English thesis specifically against pseudo-archaic texts.
• Stanford Carmack, "A Comparative View of Causative Constructions in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter 68 (2026). Zero finite causatives across 25 pseudo-archaic texts including The Late War.
• Benjamin L. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," Interpreter 7 (2013). The detailed methodological critique of the Johnson n-gram study.
• Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter 28 (2018). Direct comparison of the Book of Mormon to The Late War and three other pseudo-biblical texts.
• Eran Shalev, American Zion: The Old Testament as a Political Text (Yale UP, 2013), ch. 3. The non-Latter-day Saint academic source for the pseudo-biblicism genre argument.
• Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Education and Intellect as Described in Documentary Sources," Interpreter 59 (2023). The systematic primary-source review of Joseph's documented pre-1830 capabilities.
• Scripture Central, KnoWhy #502: "Is the Book of Mormon Like Any Other Nineteenth Century Book?" — accessible synthesis.

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1. Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 9, pp. 21–23. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

2. Stanford Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," BYU Studies Quarterly 63, no. 3 (2024): 49+. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/book-of-mormon-grammar-and-translation — Verbatim: "The syntax and grammar of the text provide some of the most important evidence pointing to the Book of Mormon being the result of a revelation of words to Joseph Smith." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

3. Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," 49+. Verbatim: "The twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts examined for this study don't have any instances of finite causative syntax and very little personal which and hardly any 'did cause' (four instances total in two pseudoarchaic texts)." ↩︎ ↩︎

4. Carmack, "Causative Constructions," 223–242. Verbatim: "The finite intensity in the pseudo-archaic texts with causatives is zero, since there are no examples of finite causatives at all, neither with the verb cause nor with the verb make." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

5. 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"). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

6. Eran Shalev, "'Written in the Style of Antiquity': Pseudo-Biblicism and the Early American Republic, 1770–1830," Church History 79, no. 4 (2010): 800–826. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

7. Warren P. Aston, "A History of NaHoM," BYU Studies Quarterly 51, no. 2 (2012): 79–98. https://byustudies.byu.edu/article/a-history-of-nahom/ — Verbatim: "The three altars were unearthed in 1988 by German archaeologists amid the ruins of the Bar'an temple near Marib, in modern-day Yemen." S. Kent Brown of BYU published the first scholarly identification of this NHM with the Book of Mormon's Nahom in 1999. Aston also notes: "The first report of a fertile location on the Arabian coast did not come to the outside world until 1846." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

8. John Tvedtnes, "The Isaiah Variants in the Book of Mormon," FARMS Preliminary Report, 1981. Systematic scoring of 234 Isaiah variants between the Book of Mormon and the KJV against ancient manuscript witnesses including the Dead Sea Scrolls. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

9. Matt Roper, Paul 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. https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/jbms/vol21/iss1/4/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

10. Hunt, The Late War, ch. 1, vv. 1–3, as read in the archive.org full-text edition: https://archive.org/stream/latewarbetweenun00hunt/latewarbetweenun00hunt_djvu.txt. ↩︎

11. Gilbert J. Hunt, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain, from June 1812, to February 1815 (New York: David Longworth, 1816). Full text available at https://archive.org/details/latewarbetweenun00hunt. ↩︎ ↩︎

12. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 338. Verbatim: "And within the Book of Mormon, of the potential 200,000+ unique phrases, only 0.27% could be derived from The Late War." ↩︎ ↩︎

13. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 355. Verbatim: "Hunt wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

14. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 351–353. Verbatim: "after his wild marketing scheme ended in 1819, the book was never re-published (or even reprinted)." McGuire's review of the bibliographic record on these pages traces Hunt's marketing efforts (including soliciting orders from booksellers and publishers, promising their own names on title pages) and concludes that no further editions appeared after 1819. ↩︎ ↩︎

15. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 351–353. Verbatim: "There is no indication that it was ever actually used in a school as a school text." ↩︎ ↩︎

16. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Education," 5, quoting Pomeroy Tucker. Verbatim: "Hunting and fishing...and idly lounging around the stores and shops in the village...instead of going to school like other boys." ↩︎ ↩︎

17. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Education," 25, quoting Joseph Smith's 1832 history. Verbatim: "Deprived of the benefit of an education...I was merely instructed in reading, writing and the ground rules of arithmetic." ↩︎ ↩︎

18. Eran Shalev is a senior lecturer in History at the University of Haifa, Israel. American Zion was published by Yale University Press, a major academic press. Shalev is not a Latter-day Saint and has no apologetic stake in this debate. https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300205909/american-zion/ ↩︎

19. Eran Shalev, in Americanist Approaches to The Book of Mormon, ed. Elizabeth Fenton and Jared Hickman (Oxford University Press, 2019). ↩︎

20. Matt Roper and Paul Fields, "Scriptural Style in Early Nineteenth Century American Literature," FAIR Conference, August 2014. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/conference/august-2014/scriptural-style-in-early-nineteenth-century-american-literature ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

21. Stanford Carmack, "A Comparative View of Causative Constructions in the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 68 (2026): 223–242. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-comparative-view-of-causative-constructions-in-the-book-of-mormon/ — Verbatim: "a corpus of twenty-five pseudo-archaic texts containing approximately 582,500 words. This corpus includes twelve longer texts (close to 561,300 words total): Chronicle of the Kings (1740), Book of Jasher (1751), American Chronicles (1775), American Revolution (1793), Napoleon the Tyrant (1809), History of Anti-Christ (1811), Late War (1816), Chronicles of Eri (1822), Ignatius and Polycarp (1827), Sacred Roll (1843), Healing of the Nations (1855), and New Gospel of Peace (1863)." ↩︎ ↩︎

22. 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). See also Scripture Central, "Why Is the Timing of the Book of Mormon's Translation So Marvelous?" KnoWhy. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-is-the-timing-of-the-book-of-mormons-translation-so-marvelous ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

23. The Book of Mormon contains 337 distinct named individuals. See Scripture Central, "How Many Different Authors Did the Book of Mormon Have?" https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/how-many-different-authors-did-the-book-of-mormon-have ↩︎

24. John L. Sorenson, Mormon's Codex: An Ancient American Book (Provo: Neal A. Maxwell Institute / Deseret Book, 2013). The Book of Mormon contains over 150 named places with internally consistent directional and distance relationships. ↩︎

25. Chris Johnson and Duane Johnson, "A Comparison of the Book of Mormon and The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain," WordTree Foundation (2013). Presented at the ExMormon Foundation conference, October 2013. Unpublished; rejected by Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. GitHub repository: https://github.com/wordtreefoundation/4-gram-study ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

26. "The Late War theory of Book of Mormon authorship," FAIR Latter-day Saints. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/The_Late_War_theory_of_Book_of_Mormon_authorship ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

27. WordTree Foundation, 4-gram study GitHub repository. https://github.com/wordtreefoundation/4-gram-study — repository contains TODO entries indicating the methodology was never fully documented for independent verification. ↩︎

28. Duane Johnson, comment on WordTree Foundation blog (2013), as quoted in McGuire 2013, p. 339: "Certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking." ↩︎

29. Benjamin L. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 7 (2013): 323–355. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/the-late-war-against-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

30. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 333. Verbatim: "Of the 549 distinct four-word locutions given in the blog and shared between the two texts, 75 of them (13.7%) come from this copyright statement." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

31. Chris and Duane Johnson, WordTree Foundation blog (2013), as quoted in McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," pp. 329–330. Verbatim: "Using a 'Uniform Match Score' (based on a size-independent matching scale), Hunt's The Late War transmitted textual influence to The Book of Nullification is highest (0.37), followed by The Book of Mormon (0.24), and finally Chronicles of Eri (0.08).... all of which were significantly higher than the baseline scores, indicating textual transmission, or common influence." The 0.06 figure for First Book of Napoleon is from the same Johnson study (per McGuire). The Johnsons' original blog post is no longer reliably accessible; for secondary commentary on these scores, see also Jonathan, "Book of Mormon and The Late War Similarities," Metacannon, March 2014, and the FAIR Late War page. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

32. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 339. Verbatim: "This results in a ratio in Pride and Prejudice of 1.4%." ↩︎

33. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 349. Verbatim: "These fragments, strung together, cannot provide us indicators to the language usage in comparison because they don't represent language usage at all." ↩︎

34. G. Bruce Schaalje, "A Bayesian Cease-Fire in the Late War on the Book of Mormon," Interpreter Foundation Blog, November 6, 2013. https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog-a-bayesian-cease-fire-in-the-late-war-on-the-book-of-mormon/ — Schaalje is a professor of statistics at Brigham Young University with a PhD from North Carolina State University and has published peer-reviewed work on statistical authorship analysis (including Roper-Fields-Schaalje 2012 in Journal of Book of Mormon Studies). Schaalje's specific posterior estimates have been critiqued as subjective at ExploringMormonism.com; the underlying structural point — that most-similar-of-100,000 is uninformative absent a baseline, which the genre-controlled false-positive provides — survives the priors debate. ↩︎

35. "Bayesian Thinking and the Statistical Analysis of the Book of Mormon," ExploringMormonism.com. https://exploringmormonism.com/bayesian-thinking-and-the-statistical-analysis-of-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎

36. Interpreter Foundation, "Estimating the Evidence, Episode 12: On Hebraic Views and Late Wars." https://interpreterfoundation.org/estimating-the-evidence-12/ ↩︎

37. Most of Carmack's seven peer-reviewed papers from 2015–2026 have appeared in Interpreter, a Latter-day Saint scholarly venue. The 2024 BYU Studies Quarterly paper is the first major treatment of his Early Modern English thesis specifically against pseudo-archaic texts to appear outside Interpreter; BYU Studies Quarterly is BYU's flagship peer-reviewed humanities journal with external editorial review and broader academic visibility than Interpreter. It remains a Latter-day Saint institutional venue, and no non-Latter-day Saint linguist has independently replicated the specific findings in a non-LDS journal. The data is publicly auditable — anyone with access to the Book of Mormon text and pseudo-biblical corpora can run the comparisons — but external linguistic engagement and independent statistical replication both remain thin. The narrower claim, that the Book of Mormon's syntax is systematically different from The Late War and the broader pseudo-biblical genre, is robust independent of the broader translation-theory framework Carmack favors. ↩︎

38. Stanford Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us About Book of Mormon Authorship," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 13 (2015): 184. Verbatim: "The B_of_M uses finite command syntax nearly 80% of the time, while the KJB prefers compact infinitival syntax, using it slightly more than 80% of the time." https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/what-command-syntax-tells-us-about-book-of-mormon-authorship/ ↩︎ ↩︎

39. Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us," 184, Table 1. Chi-square ≈ 120; p < 10⁻²⁷. ↩︎

40. Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us," 183. Verbatim: "Joseph Smith could hardly have authored this elaborate syntax." ↩︎

41. Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us," 180. Verbatim: "In contexts where both verbs are in the active voice, the B_of_M has 84 instances of this layered syntax while the KJB has only 9." ↩︎ ↩︎

42. Carmack, "What Command Syntax Tells Us," 213–214. Verbatim: "The B_of_M correlates even more closely with Caxton's 1483 translation, and it does so when nearly 20 esoteric usage rates are directly compared." ↩︎

43. Carmack, "Pseudo-Archaic Text?" 193–197. The methodology Carmack employs computes relative-frequency rates for who, which, and that across personal antecedents — analyzing high-frequency antecedents those/they/them, he/him, man/men, and people in the earliest Book of Mormon text. The Pearson correlation is computed between the resulting rate vectors for The Late War and the Book of Mormon. The paper presents the correlation but does not exhaustively detail sample-size or parametric assumptions; the underlying instance counts in pseudo-archaic texts are publicly verifiable from the source texts. ↩︎

44. Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 28 (2018): 197. Verbatim: "The Late War correlates with the King James Bible at 0.32 and with the Book of Mormon at –0.96." https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text/ ↩︎

45. Carmack, "Pseudo-Archaic Text?" 179–180. Verbatim: "The four pseudo-biblical texts examined for this study have been chosen based on frequent comparison to the Book of Mormon and/or being prominent, worthy specimens of the genus. The four texts include John Leacock's The First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times (1774–1775), Richard Snowden's The American Revolution (1793), Michael Linning's The First Book of Napoleon (1809), and Gilbert Hunt's The Late War (1816)." ↩︎

46. Carmack, "Pseudo-Archaic Text?" 222. Verbatim: "If we approach this from the angle of the pseudo-biblical authors, we realize that they give us an indication of the archaism that Joseph Smith was likely to have produced in this domain, if his effort was a conscious attempt to imitate biblical archaism." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

47. Carmack, "Pseudo-Archaic Text?" 191. Verbatim: "Yet the four pseudo-biblical writings do not have any examples of lest–shall syntax." ↩︎

48. Stanford Carmack, "A Comparison of the Book of Mormon's Subordinate That Usage," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 50 (2022): 1–32. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/a-comparison-of-the-book-of-mormons-subordinate-that-usage/ — corpus appendix listing 25 pseudo-archaic texts including The Late War (1816). ↩︎

49. Carmack, "Subordinate That Usage," 1–32. Verbatim: "Quite simply, in this domain, the dictation language is about five times as impressive in its archaism as any pseudo-archaic writing I have considered to date." ↩︎

50. Carmack, "Subordinate That Usage," 1–32. Documents "after that S" appearing 115 times in the Book of Mormon vs. 9 instances in only one of the 25 pseudo-archaic texts; "because that S" 34 instances in BoM vs. 11 instances total across only two pseudo-archaic texts. ↩︎ ↩︎

51. Carmack, "Subordinate That Usage," 1–32. Verbatim: "The implications of the English linguistic data very strongly indicate that the translation, as originally dictated by Joseph Smith, abounded in archaic early modern syntax and lexis outside the realm of Joseph's linguistic environment, and therefore was being provided to him." ↩︎

52. Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," 49+. Verbatim: "In searching for 'they which' in twenty-five pseudoarchaic texts written between the years 1740 and 1888, I found that only one text, written by a Shakespearean scholar in 1863, had examples of 'they which' (six instances)." ↩︎ ↩︎

53. Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," 49+. Verbatim: "The Book of Mormon comes in at number two in terms of texts with the most instances of past-participial spake, right behind a text published in 1646." ↩︎

54. Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," 49+. Verbatim: "There is no other text that has even five of these. Historically speaking, this was Scottish English usage, first attested in the middle of the seventeenth century." ↩︎

55. Carmack, "Book of Mormon Grammar and Translation," 49+. Verbatim: "Based on focused study, my position is that almost all the nonstandard grammar in the Book of Mormon should not be attributed to him [Joseph Smith]." ↩︎ ↩︎

56. Carmack, "Causative Constructions," 223–242. Verbatim: "The pseudo-archaic authors who used causatives, in the corpus of twenty-five texts, had more than 100 opportunities to employ a finite cause causative, but they did not do so." ↩︎ ↩︎

57. Carmack, "Causative Constructions," 223–242. Documents that even Bunyan's 17th-century The Holy War — with seven finite causatives — did not prompt later pseudo-archaic authors to produce any finite causatives in their imitations. ↩︎

58. Carmack, "Causative Constructions," 223–242. Verbatim: "The comparative evidence indicates that the Book of Mormon's causative complex did not originate with Joseph Smith." ↩︎ ↩︎

59. Stanford Carmack, "How Joseph Smith's Grammar Differed from Book of Mormon Grammar: Evidence from the 1832 History," Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture 25 (2017): 239–259. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar/ ↩︎

60. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Book I, as quoted in Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. Predates both The Late War (1816) and the Book of Mormon (1830) by approximately 2,200 years. ↩︎

61. Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, "Was the Book of Mormon Inspired by The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain?" July 2019. https://heavymetalmormon.com/2019/07/26/was-the-book-of-mormon-inspired-by-the-late-war-between-the-united-states-and-great-britain/ — Verbatim: "the themes that are similar between the Late War and the Book of Mormon are found in other ancient sources." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

62. Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. Verbatim: "this structure is a scène a faire — that this is a basic structure common to many battles." ↩︎

63. Exodus 35:32 (KJV), as cited in "The Late War theory of Book of Mormon authorship," FAIR Latter-day Saints. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/The_Late_War_theory_of_Book_of_Mormon_authorship ↩︎

64. Jeff Lindsay, "Was The Late War Against the United States a Source for The Book of Mormon? No!" LDSFAQ. https://www.jefflindsay.com/LDSFAQ/late-war.html — Verbatim: "Over 1% of the books published in the years around and prior to the Book of Mormon used this phrase (some years had 4% or more of their published books incorporating the phrase)." ↩︎

65. Lindsay, LDSFAQ Late War. Verbatim: "'Curious workmanship' is not in the Bible and is certainly not a common phrase in the English of today, but yes, there it is in both the Book of Mormon and The Late War." ↩︎

66. FAIR Latter-day Saints, "The Late War theory." Verbatim: "It seems unlikely that Joseph Smith would base three righteous disciples on the story of three 'lying prophets among the savages' who 'prophesied according to their own wishes.'" ↩︎

67. Josephus, Wars of the Jews III, 5:1–2, as quoted in Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. ↩︎

68. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War Book IV, as quoted in Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. ↩︎

69. 1 Maccabees 13:33, as quoted in Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. ↩︎

70. Heavy Metal Book of Mormon, July 2019. Verbatim: "These themes are so common in all literature that I don't know why they included it in their analysis." ↩︎

71. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "The first is non-contextual words…The second is archaic words like 'thee' and 'thou'…A third is distinguishing phrases…And last of all, the fourth dimension is the content topics." ↩︎

72. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "The Book of Mormon is about twice as similar as those other two documents in its use of non-contextual words." ↩︎

73. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "The Book of Mormon and the King James version are almost identical in the use of those words while The American Revolution and The Late War use those words much less." ↩︎

74. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "The Book of Mormon with the King James Version, about seven times more similar in how they are used than in the other documents." ↩︎

75. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "The Latin embellishments in The American Revolution are used 250 times per 10000, while the Book of Mormon uses it only 25 times or about only 1/10 of that amount." ↩︎

76. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "Joseph Smith was either a literary genius, or a prophet, and we are all free to take our pick." ↩︎

77. Roper and Fields, "Scriptural Style." Verbatim: "Pseudo-Biblicism was popular from about 1750 to about 1850 after which it seems to have fallen out of use." ↩︎

78. "On the Alleged Similarities between The Late War and the Book of Mormon," Book of Mormonism, August 2023. https://bookofmormonism.com/2023/08/16/on-the-alleged-similarities-between-the-late-war-and-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎

79. Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (Lafayette, NY: Rick Grunder Books, 2008), entry MP193 / p. 770. The "must sober our perspective" line is the only verified verbatim from this source; it is verified through the CES Letter's own quotation. Mormon Parallels is a 2,088-page bibliographic catalogue specifically dedicated to identifying parallels between 19th-century texts and Latter-day Saint scripture. ↩︎ ↩︎

80. "The Late War and the Book of Mormon," Mormonism Research Ministry. https://mrm.org/the-late-war-and-the-book-of-mormon ↩︎ ↩︎

81. Brian C. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Education and Intellect as Described in Documentary Sources," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 59 (2023): 1–32, abstract. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/joseph-smiths-education-and-intellect-as-described-in-documentary-sources/ — Verbatim: "Despite its current popularity, the theory that Joseph Smith possessed the skills needed to create the Book of Mormon in 1829 is contradicted by dozens of eyewitness accounts and supported only by minimal historical data." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

82. Hales, "Joseph Smith's Education," abstract. Verbatim: "A review of all available documentation shows that no acquaintance at that time or later called him highly educated or as capable of authoring the Book of Mormon." ↩︎

83. Brian C. Hales, "Curiously Unique: Joseph Smith as Author of the Book of Mormon," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 31 (2019): 151–190. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/curiously-unique-joseph-smith-as-author-of-the-book-of-mormon/ — Verbatim: "Yet overall, it appears that if Joseph Smith created the Book of Mormon from his own intellect, his efforts as an author stand out as curiously unique." Lucy Mack Smith quote: "Joseph...seemed much less inclined to the perusal of books than any of the rest of our children" (Lucy Mack Smith, History of Joseph Smith). ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

84. Brian C. Hales, "Automatic Writing and the Book of Mormon: An Update," Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 52, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 1–50. https://www.dialoguejournal.com/articles/automatic-writing-and-the-book-of-mormon-an-update/ — Verbatim: "Grouping the Book of Mormon with automatic writing provides no answer to the question, 'Where did all the words come from?'" ↩︎

85. No documentation connects Joseph Smith or his family to The Late War. McGuire discusses the book's limited circulation on pp. 351–352 of "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon." See also "The Late War," Debunking CES Letter. https://debunking-cesletter.com/book-of-mormon-1/the-late-war/ ↩︎

86. Emma Smith, interview with Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published in The Saints' Herald 26, no. 19 (October 1, 1879): 289–290. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

87. Ryan Thomas, "The Book of Mormon and The Late War: Direct Literary Dependence?" Patheos (Faith-Promoting Rumor), October 2013. https://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithpromotingrumor/2013/10/the-book-of-mormon-and-the-late-war-direct-literary-dependence/ — Verbatim quotes (verified): "The similarities are simply too numerous and substantive to think that they could have originated by chance from two authors who happened to write in the pseudo-biblical genre"; "Smith did not borrow directly from the LW (at least for the majority of the narrative content) during the process of composing the BoM"; "We should assume at least some temporal distance separating Joseph Smith's exposure to the LW and his production of the BoM." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

88. Thomas, "Direct Literary Dependence?" Thomas characterizes the following parallels as "very strong": battle at fort, capturing capital city, defensive river battle, natives laying down weapons, fearless young soldiers, converted natives, calamitous destruction, land description, boat building, narrator's mourning. ↩︎

89. A fuller account of the apologetic case's limits. The cite-base for the response is heavily Latter-day Saint scholarship — McGuire, Carmack (mostly), Schaalje, Roper, Fields, and Hales have all published predominantly through LDS organizations. Carmack's 2024 BYU Studies Quarterly paper partially addresses the venue concentration, and Hales's 2019 Dialogue paper extends the cite base further. But the concentration reflects the reality that LDS scholars have done the most detailed work on this topic; no non-LDS scholar has published a defense of the Johnson methodology or a rebuttal of McGuire's or Carmack's specific findings. The non-LDS scholars who have engaged with the broader question — Shalev at Yale, Thomas at Patheos — reach conclusions more nuanced than the CES Letter's argument. On independent replication: the data is publicly auditable from EEBO and other corpora, and the underlying instance counts (e.g., "they which" appearing zero times in 24 of 25 pseudo-archaic texts) are verifiable by inspection. The scientific standard for a finding of this kind would be that an independent researcher, using independent methods, reproduces the result — which has not yet happened. On translation theory: Royal Skousen, whose Critical Text Project provides Carmack's data, has been more cautious about what Early Modern English patterns ultimately prove. Some scholars have proposed that Joseph's English may have retained archaic features through dialect transmission; the hypothesis has been challenged but not definitively refuted. None of these caveats invalidate the narrower comparative finding (Book of Mormon vs. pseudo-archaic genre) that load-bears the rebuttal. ↩︎

90. McGuire, "The Late War Against the Book of Mormon," 355. Verbatim: "The Book of Mormon, on the other hand, doesn't just use biblical language, it engages biblical issues – it asks questions about morality, about agency, about creation. It ponders the meaning of writing and reading. It describes religious experience." ↩︎

91. Oliver Cowdery, statement recorded by Reuben Miller, October 21, 1848. ↩︎

92. Royal Skousen, "How Joseph Smith Translated the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript," Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 7, no. 1 (1998): 27. Documents that Oliver Cowdery purchased a Bible from E.B. Grandin in Palmyra on October 8, 1829 — months after the Book of Mormon translation was completed in late June 1829. ↩︎

93. Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon, 6 vols. (Provo: BYU Studies, 2004–2009). See also Scripture Central, "No Revisions" evidence summary. https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/book-of-mormon-evidence-no-substantive-revisions ↩︎

94. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (Oxford University Press, 2010). Hardy is a professor of history at UNC-Asheville. Hardy's methodological framing observes that the Book of Mormon's internal geography is sufficiently detailed and consistent that the text gives the impression its author had access to maps, charts, or comparable visual aids — paraphrased here rather than quoted because the exact wording across editions of his published commentary is variable. ↩︎

95. Terryl Givens, By the Hand of Mormon: The American Scripture That Launched a New World Religion (Oxford University Press, 2002). ↩︎

96. Bruce Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament (United Bible Societies, 1971). The critical text decision confirming the omission of "without a cause" as the original reading was published by Metzger in 1956. ↩︎

97. Donald W. Parry, "Hebraisms and Other Ancient Peculiarities in the Book of Mormon," cited at Scripture Central. Helaman 12:13–21 in the original 1830 text contains seven instances of the if-and pattern; Joseph Smith removed several during later editing, not recognizing their significance. ↩︎

98. Scripture Central, "Why Are There Hebraisms in the Book of Mormon?" KnoWhy. Donald Parry: "It is highly doubtful that Joseph Smith knew anything about the Hebraic features of the Book of Mormon that have been identified by scholars long after his death." John Tvedtnes: "Many expressions used in the Book of Mormon are awkward or unexpected in English, even in Joseph Smith's time. Yet they make good sense when viewed as translations, perhaps as too literal translations, from an ancient text written in a Hebrew-like language." ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎

99. John W. Welch, "How Much Was Known About Chiasmus in 1829?" FARMS Review 15, no. 1 (2003). Welch discovered extended chiasmus in the Book of Mormon while serving as a missionary in Germany in 1967. Alma 36 contains a sophisticated 17-element chiasm. The first systematic Western treatment of chiasmus in biblical literature was John Forbes's 1854 The Symmetrical Structure of Scripture. ↩︎

100. Matthew Roper, "Anachronisms: Accidental Evidence in Book of Mormon Criticisms," Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 65 (2025): 1–280. Tracks 226 Book of Mormon anachronism claims advanced across 1,000+ critical publications since 1830, scored at four time points (1844, 1900, 1965, 2024). ↩︎