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 charge here is borrowing, plain and simple. There was a book, The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain, published a few years before the Book of Mormon. It retold the War of 1812 in the old-fashioned cadence of the King James Bible, full of "it came to pass" and stripling soldiers and curious workmanship. It sounds, in spots, a lot like the Book of Mormon. So, the argument goes, Joseph Smith must have read it, or one like it, and borrowed from it. The dramatic version adds a computer study: someone fed both books through software, and The Late War came back near the very top of a hundred thousand old books for similarity.
The resemblance is real, and worth granting up front. But once you ask what the computer actually measured, and once you look past the surface vocabulary to the grammar underneath, the borrowing case does not just weaken. It turns over and points the other way.
Yes, the two books sound alike
Start by giving the criticism its due, because there is something to it.
The Late War was written on purpose to imitate the Bible. Its author, Gilbert Hunt, wanted a patriotic history that read like scripture, and one early reviewer of the genre put Hunt's motive bluntly: he "wanted to create a text that read like scripture as a marketing tool."[2] He was selling a product to people who loved the sound of the King James Bible, so he gave them the War of 1812 in that voice.
And he was not alone. Writing American events in mock-biblical English was a whole literary fashion in early America, not some rare trick only Hunt knew. A non-Latter-day Saint historian, Eran Shalev at the University of Haifa, has documented dozens of these books in volumes from Yale and Oxford, a fashion that ran from roughly 1750 to 1850.[3] They all reached for the same toolkit: "thee" and "thou," verbs ending in "-eth," numbered verses, "it came to pass." The Book of Mormon came out in 1830, right in the middle of that window.
So when two books from the same era both dress American (or, for the Book of Mormon, ancient American) stories in Bible language, finding shared King James phrases between them is exactly what you would expect. It is like noticing two Westerns both have a saloon scene. The shared furniture comes from the genre, not from one author copying the other. The real question is whether anything links these two books beyond the genre they share. That is what the computer study claimed to find, so look at what it found.
What the computer actually counted
In 2013 two brothers, Chris and Duane Johnson, ran software comparing the Book of Mormon against roughly 100,000 books printed before 1830. The program hunted for shared four-word phrases, the rarer the better, and The Late War surfaced near the top.[4] That ranking is the engine of the whole claim. It sounds devastating until you look at which phrases the program scored highest.
The most detailed examination of the study was done by Benjamin McGuire, and his first finding is almost comic.[5] The text of the Book of Mormon they fed the program included its copyright page, the standard legal notice the U.S. copyright law of 1790 required every American book to print. The Late War had the same notice, for the same reason: it was published under the same law. The program could not tell the difference between scripture and a federal form.
So among the 549 shared four-word phrases the study flagged between the two books, 75 of them, 13.7 percent, the single biggest block, came straight out of that copyright boilerplate.[6] Phrases like "act entitled an act," "be it remembered that," "in conformity to the," "the encouragement of learning." Neither Joseph Smith nor Gilbert Hunt wrote a word of those. Congress did. More than one match in eight, the strongest "evidence" of a secret link between the two books, is a legal form that every book of the era carried.
Throw out the copyright page and the leftover overlap is tiny. Of the more than 200,000 distinctive four-word phrases in the Book of Mormon, only about 0.27 percent could have come from The Late War at all.[7] And more than half of even that thin residue is just shared King James Bible wording, the genre furniture again.
The test the study fails
A small number does not settle anything by itself, because any two long books will share a little. The number only means something when you compare it to what unrelated books in the same style score. The critics' own data hands us that comparison, and it is the part that should give a worried reader the most relief.
The Johnsons ran their program on another mock-biblical book, The Book of Nullification, an anonymous 1830s political tract about a states-rights fight. It has nothing to do with Joseph Smith: published anonymously around the same time, about a completely different subject, no shared characters or story. If the program were really detecting borrowing, this unrelated tract should score low against The Late War.
It scored higher than the Book of Mormon did. On the Johnsons' own published numbers, The Late War matched The Book of Nullification at 0.37 and the Book of Mormon at only 0.24, about 50 percent lower.[8] A book demonstrably unconnected to Joseph Smith looks more like The Late War than the Book of Mormon does, measured by the very tool the CES Letter is citing. That is the tell. The program never detected one book borrowing from another in the first place. It was picking up the mock-biblical style that all these books share, flagging genre rather than theft. (McGuire ran a second check outside the genre, two ordinary Jane Austen-era novels with no connection, and they overlapped at more than five times the Book of Mormon's rate, which makes the same point from the other side. The full breakdown is in the in-depth version.)
The study itself never made it through the front door. It was turned down by a journal, was never published in any peer-reviewed venue, and has gone undefended by its authors since 2013, even as scholars pointed out these problems. One of the brothers admitted on his own blog that "certain baseline data such as the false positive rate of our tools are still lacking."[9] In plain terms: they never established how often their method cries wolf. The Nullification result shows the answer is "often."
The grammar runs the opposite way
Everything so far is about surface wording. The deepest answer, and the one that closes the case, is about grammar, and it is the part Joseph Smith could not have faked even if he had owned The Late War and memorized it.
The idea is simple. Vocabulary is easy to imitate. If you want to sound like the Bible, you sprinkle in "thee" and "thou" and "it came to pass," and anyone can do it. But the deep grammar of a language, the habitual way it builds sentences, is something writers absorb without thinking, and it is tied to the era they live in. You cannot fake the grammar of a century you never read. If Joseph borrowed the Book of Mormon's biblical sound from books like The Late War, then under the hood its grammar should match theirs. It does the reverse.
A Stanford-trained linguist, Stanford Carmack, has spent seven peer-reviewed papers measuring this, including one in 2024 in BYU Studies Quarterly, a journal outside the usual Latter-day Saint apologetic outlets.[10] He compared the Book of Mormon against The Late War and two dozen other mock-biblical books on dozens of fine grammatical habits. Three examples give the flavor.
Take a single old construction, "they which" used of people, as in "they which were with him," where modern English wants "who" or "that." It had nearly died out of English by the 1800s. Carmack searched for it in 25 mock-biblical texts written between 1740 and 1888, exactly the kind of books the borrowing theory needs Joseph to have drawn on. Twenty-four of the 25, The Late War among them, used it zero times. The one exception was an 1863 author who was a Shakespeare scholar steeped in old English drama, and even he managed it only six times.[11] The Book of Mormon uses personal "they which" about 100 times.
Or take "finite causatives," a particular way of phrasing a command, the kind of detail no imitator would ever think to fake. Across those 25 books, roughly 582,500 words of mock-biblical writing with more than a hundred natural openings to use the form, the count is zero.[12][13] None of them produced a single one. The Book of Mormon has 235.[14]
The sharpest single number comes from a direct grammatical comparison. Carmack measured how the Book of Mormon and The Late War each choose between "who," "which," and "that," and ran the standard statistic for how alike two patterns are. It ranges from +1 (identical) to -1 (perfect opposites). The Late War scored -0.96 against the Book of Mormon.[15] As close to mirror-opposite as two things written in English can be. If Joseph had been imitating The Late War, that number should sit near +1. Finding -0.96 is the fingerprint of two books from completely different grammatical worlds. Carmack's own conclusion is that "almost all the nonstandard grammar in the Book of Mormon should not be attributed to" Joseph Smith.[16]
The grammar of the Book of Mormon does not match The Late War, does not match the King James Bible, and does not even match Joseph Smith's own letters and journals, which read like the plain modern English of his day.[17] It matches a form of English that was already going out of style when the King James Bible was printed, two hundred years before Joseph was born. (The full grammatical case is here.)
The honest read on the parallels
A handful of the parallels are real, and they are closer than "it came to pass."
The strongest is a cluster about volunteer soldiers. The Late War describes roughly two thousand chosen men who "gave their services freely for the good of their country"; the Book of Mormon has its two thousand young men who volunteer "to defend their country" and are "exceedingly valiant for courage."[1:1] The number, the volunteering, and the courage all line up at once. The closest single phrase is similar: The Late War has "a great multitude flocked to the banners," and Alma 62:5 has "thousands did flock unto his standard." Those are not nothing.
But notice two things. First, a band of brave volunteers fighting for freedom is one of the oldest stock scenes in war writing. Thucydides described volunteers fighting for liberty around 431 BC, more than two thousand years before either book.[1:2] When the scene shows up in two war stories written in Bible English, the genre supplies it long before any author needs to. Second, several of the CES Letter's flashier "parallels" fall apart the moment you read the source. The Late War's "prophets" are lying villains "among the savages"; the Book of Mormon's Three Nephites are righteous disciples of Christ.[18] Those two roles are moral opposites. The word "stripling" appears in The Late War exactly twice, both as a plain word for a young man, never tied to any band of soldiers.[18:1] (The parallels are worked through one by one in the in-depth version.)
The most careful critic on this question, an independent non-Latter-day Saint scholar named Ryan Thomas, looked hard at the genuine parallels and concluded that Joseph did not copy from The Late War while writing, but may have absorbed something from it years earlier and reproduced it from memory.[19] That is the strongest fair-minded form of the criticism, and it deserves a straight answer rather than a brush-off. The answer is the grammar. Memory could carry a phrase or a scene across the years. It could not carry a hundred uses of a dead construction out of a book that contained zero of them. Whatever Joseph might have half-remembered, he could not have remembered grammar that was not there. The strongest version of the critics' case is laid out in full here.
A sliver, not the book
Step back and the comparison answers itself. The Late War is a four-year war story by a New York publisher: real battles, real generals like Madison and Jackson, the burning of Washington, and not one line of theology. The Book of Mormon is a thousand-year history of a civilization, built around the visit of the resurrected Christ, with sustained covenant doctrine, hundreds of named people, an internally consistent geography spread across hundreds of pages, and distinct authorial voices that statistics can tell apart. Even if you handed the critics every shared phrase they want, that overlap covers a fraction of one percent of the Book of Mormon. The other ninety-nine-plus percent has no source in The Late War at all.
And remember how the Book of Mormon came to be. A young man with two years of schooling dictated all 269,000 words of it in roughly sixty working days, with his face in a hat, no notes, no manuscript, no second draft.[20] Out of that came a tribal name, Nahom, later found carved on altars unearthed in Yemen in 1988; Arabian geography no Western book described until 1846; Isaiah readings later confirmed by the Dead Sea Scrolls, which stayed sealed in a cave until 1947.[21][22] A War of 1812 textbook supplies none of that. Neither does any book Joseph could have read.
The computer study that started all this looked, at a glance, like the strongest version of the criticism. Examined phrase by phrase, its best matches keep dissolving into copyright forms, genre conventions, and King James cadence, never into an actual fingerprint linking the two books. What the Book of Mormon contains, and the strange grammar it is written in, point the opposite direction from the one the CES Letter needs.
Want the full case, including the strongest arguments the critics make and every source? Read the in-depth version.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 9, pp. 21–23. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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"). ↩︎
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 ↩︎
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/ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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)." ↩︎
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)." ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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. ↩︎
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/ ↩︎
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]." ↩︎
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/ ↩︎
"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 ↩︎ ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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 ↩︎
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." ↩︎
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. ↩︎