Appearance
The Late War
The claim:
"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 — all of this a mere decade before the publication of the Book of Mormon?"[1]
The CES Letter presents The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain — a War of 1812 textbook written in King James Bible-style English — as a likely source for the Book of Mormon. It lists about 25 shared phrases and themes, cites an unpublished computer study, and quotes an antiquarian book dealer to suggest Joseph Smith borrowed from it.
Both books say "it came to pass." Both mention fortifications, stripling soldiers, and curious workmanship. A computer study found hundreds of shared four-word phrases.
But what happens when you actually check the numbers?
The computer study that started it all
In 2013, Chris and Duane Johnson of the WordTree Foundation ran a 4-gram analysis — comparing every sequence of four consecutive words in the 1830 Book of Mormon against roughly 100,000 pre-1830 books.[2]
They found 549 shared four-word phrases between the Book of Mormon and The Late War. The result went viral in ex-Mormon communities.
The study was never peer-reviewed. It was submitted to Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought — a publication sympathetic to critical scholarship on Mormonism — and rejected.[3]
0.23%
Benjamin McGuire published a detailed rebuttal in Interpreter that same year.[3:1]
| Metric | Number |
|---|---|
| Unique 4-word phrases in the Book of Mormon | ~200,000 |
| Shared with The Late War | 549 |
| After removing copyright boilerplate | 474 |
| Overlap as % of Book of Mormon | 0.23% |
| Shared phrases traceable to KJV language | 57.3% |
Seventy-five of the 549 "shared" phrases came from the standardized copyright statement — a fill-in-the-blank legal form stamped into virtually every American book published between 1790 and 1831.[3:2] Neither Joseph Smith nor Gilbert Hunt authored those phrases. The U.S. Congress did.
Once you strip out the copyright boilerplate and the KJV phrases both texts inherited from the Bible, what remains is a thin residue of common English expressions from the era.
The Jane Austen test
McGuire applied the Johnsons' own methodology to a known case. Pride and Prejudice and The Officer's Daughter share 1,934 four-word phrases — a 1.4% overlap with 63% shared vocabulary.[3:3]
No scholar has ever proposed a literary relationship between those two books.
The Late War–Book of Mormon connection (0.23%) is more than five times weaker than that random pairing. If this methodology proved anything, it would prove Jane Austen plagiarized a book she never read.
The Texas Sharpshooter problem
The Johnsons searched 100,000+ books and drew their target around whichever one scored highest.
By definition, some book will always rank first. The question is whether that score rises meaningfully above background noise. McGuire's analysis shows it does not.
Harold Love, an authority on textual attribution, warned: "Now that the capacity to multiply parallels — most of which will be misleading — is almost unlimited, intelligent selectivity has never been more important."[3:4]
Bottom line: The computer study was rejected by a critical journal, inflated by copyright boilerplate, and produces the same kind of "matches" between texts no one believes are related. The actual overlap is 0.23%.
Both books imitate the same source
The CES Letter actually explains why the parallels exist — then fails to follow its own logic.
It states that The Late War was "specifically written in a Jacobean English style to imitate the King James Bible" to "elevate the moral themes" and inspire "patriotism and piety."[1:1]
That is the explanation. Both texts use KJV-style English. Both draw their vocabulary from the same well.
| Phrase | Origin | In The Late War? | In the Book of Mormon? |
|---|---|---|---|
| "it came to pass" | KJV (727 times) | Yes | Yes |
| "curious workmanship" | Exodus 28:6, 35:32 | Applied to weapons | Applied to various objects |
| "rod of iron" | Revelation 2:27, 19:15 | Yes | Yes |
| "stripling" | 1 Samuel 17:56 | Twice (unconnected to 2,000 warriors) | Stripling warriors, Alma 53 |
| Date phrasing ("fourth day of seventh month") | Zechariah, Nehemiah, 2 Kings | Yes | Yes |
Any text imitating the King James Bible will share these phrases with any other text that does the same. Finding "once upon a time" in two different fairy tales does not prove one copied the other.
The parallels that collapse on inspection
Some of the CES Letter's specific claims misrepresent the source text.
"2,000 stripling warriors." "Stripling" appears twice in The Late War — both times as a singular noun ("a stripling from the south"), neither connected to 2,000 soldiers. The "about two thousand" reference appears separately, in an unrelated passage. The CES Letter collapses unconnected sentences into a single "parallel."[3:5]
"Fortifications built by freemen." In the Book of Mormon, the freemen never build fortifications. "Freemen" was standard Colonial American political terminology appearing in state constitutions and town charters.[4]
"Three Indian prophets." The Late War's prophets are "lying prophets among the savages." The Book of Mormon's Three Nephites are righteous disciples of Jesus Christ.[4:1] The parallel is an inversion, not a match.
"Earthquake followed by great darkness." The Late War describes the historical New Madrid earthquakes of 1811–1812. The Book of Mormon describes cosmic upheaval at Christ's crucifixion (3 Nephi 8). The earthquake-plus-darkness pattern also appears in Exodus, the Gospels, and Revelation. It is a biblical motif, not evidence of dependence on a War of 1812 textbook.
Bottom line: The CES Letter's parallels are KJV phrases, universal war themes, or manufactured connections that misrepresent the source text. Each one dissolves under scrutiny.
The Rick Grunder quote in context
The CES Letter quotes Rick Grunder, "Former BYU Library Bibliographic Dept. Chairman":
"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."[5]
Grunder's Mormon Parallels is a bibliographic catalogue — it documents parallels between 19th-century texts and Mormon scripture comprehensively and without a thesis. The CES Letter recruits his caution as a conclusion. There is a difference between "this is worth noting" and "this proves plagiarism."
The syntax goes in opposite directions
If Joseph Smith borrowed from The Late War, you would expect their grammar to match. Stanford Carmack tested this.[6]
| Syntactic Feature | Book of Mormon | The Late War | Direction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Archaic "of" in passive constructions | 46% | Below 10% | Opposite |
| Personal "which" (vs. "who/whom") | 52% | Strongly prefers "who(m)" | Negatively correlated |
| Periphrastic "did" adjacent to infinitive | 90%+ | 4.8% | Anti-correlated (~-0.6) |
| Finite complements after "cause" | 57.6% | 0% | Opposite |
The two books are not merely different. They are syntactically anti-correlated — their grammar moves in opposite directions.
The Late War imitates biblical vocabulary while using modern grammar. The Book of Mormon uses genuinely archaic grammar from the 1500s–1600s — patterns that predate the King James Bible itself.[6:1]
Joseph Smith's own 1832 History uses periphrastic "did" at 0%.[7] He didn't write this way. The KJV doesn't use it at these rates. The Late War doesn't use it at these rates. The Book of Mormon matches English two centuries older than any of them.
You cannot produce a text with pre-KJV syntax by copying from a text with post-KJV syntax.
The Bayesian math
G. Bruce Schaalje (PhD Statistics, North Carolina State; BYU professor) applied Bayesian reasoning to the Johnson study.[8]
Even starting with a generous 50% prior — a coin flip that Joseph Smith used The Late War — and granting an 80% likelihood ratio for the evidence, the posterior probability barely rises above 60%.
But the prior should be far lower than 50%. No one has documented that Joseph Smith ever saw the book. No eyewitness mentions it. The translation process as described by scribes does not accommodate an external source text.
With a realistic prior, the Johnson evidence barely moves the needle.
Bottom line: The Book of Mormon's grammar is the near-perfect opposite of pseudobiblical texts like The Late War. The "KJV imitation" theory doesn't fail quietly — it produces exactly the wrong prediction.
What The Late War can't explain
The positive evidence creates a harder problem for the plagiarism theory than any defensive argument does.
| Feature | The Late War | Book of Mormon |
|---|---|---|
| Subject | War of 1812 | 1,000-year civilization narrative |
| Length | ~59,679 words | ~268,163 words (4.5x longer) |
| Theology | None | Atonement, Fall, Resurrection, covenant theology |
| Characters | Historical figures in biblical dress | 330+ proper names across 1,000 years |
| Structure | Linear war narrative | Multiple interlocking timelines, embedded documents, letters, sermons |
| Prophecy | None | Extensive prophetic framework with internal fulfillments |
| Geography | Known American battlefields | Detailed internal geography with features confirmed in the Arabian Peninsula |
Even if The Late War contributed 0.23% of the Book of Mormon's phrases, the remaining 99.77% still needs an explanation.
60 days, no notes, no revisions
The Book of Mormon is roughly 269,000 words dictated in about 60 working days.[9] Multiple scribes described Joseph dictating with his face in a hat containing a seer stone, no books or manuscripts present.
Emma Smith: "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."[10]
No outlines. No substantive revisions to earlier sections as later ones were dictated. A clean first draft of a text containing 330+ proper names, three calendar systems, and complex interlocking timelines.[11]
Arabian geography no book could supply
The Book of Mormon describes Lehi's trail through the Arabian Peninsula with details — including the burial site Nahom (matching the NHM tribal name attested in ancient South Arabian inscriptions) and a fertile coastal location matching Khor Kharfot — confirmed by modern archaeology and geography.[12]
The Late War has nothing comparable. Neither does any other proposed 19th-century source.
Grammar that predates the KJV
The Book of Mormon contains if-and conditional clauses (Mosiah 2:21, Helaman 12:13–21) — Hebrew syntax absent from the KJV entirely.[6:2] Joseph Smith removed several of these during later editing, not recognizing their significance.
Alma 36 contains a chiastic structure spanning 1,230 words with Jesus Christ at the precise center — a Hebrew literary form whose systematic study didn't begin until Nils Lund's work in 1930.[13] The Late War contains nothing remotely comparable.
A KJV imitator cannot produce syntax that isn't in the KJV.
Worth Acknowledging
The strongest form of the Late War argument does not claim direct plagiarism. It argues that pseudo-biblical English was an accessible literary register in early 19th-century America, and that the Book of Mormon's KJV-style language does not require ancient golden plates.
Simple Hebraisms like "it came to pass" or basic parallelism do appear in pseudo-biblical texts and are, by themselves, weak evidence for antiquity.
But the argument has limits: the Book of Mormon's syntax is genuinely archaic in ways The Late War's is not, the theological and narrative content has no 19th-century parallel, and demonstrating that a style was reproducible does not explain the substance of a 269,000-word text dictated in 60 days.
Bottom line: The actual textual overlap between The Late War and the Book of Mormon is 0.23% — five times weaker than random pairings of unrelated novels. Over half the shared phrases trace to the King James Bible. The two books are syntactically anti-correlated. And even if every claimed parallel were granted, The Late War cannot account for the Book of Mormon's theology, narrative complexity, Arabian geography, or the documented circumstances of its production.
For the CES Letter's other proposed 19th-century sources, see View of the Hebrews and The First Book of Napoleon.
Runnells, CES Letter (2017), "Book of Mormon," no. 9, pp. 21–23. ↩︎ ↩︎
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). Unpublished; rejected by Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 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/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
"The Late War theory of Book of Mormon authorship," FAIR. https://www.fairlatterdaysaints.org/answers/The_Late_War_theory_of_Book_of_Mormon_authorship ↩︎ ↩︎
Rick Grunder, Mormon Parallels: A Bibliographic Source (Lafayette, NY: Rick Grunder Books, 2008), entry MP193. https://www.rickgrunder.com/parallels/mp193.pdf ↩︎
Stanford Carmack, "Is the Book of Mormon a Pseudo-Archaic Text?" Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship 28 (2018): 177–232. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/is-the-book-of-mormon-a-pseudo-archaic-text/ ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
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): 1–50. https://interpreterfoundation.org/journal/how-joseph-smiths-grammar-differed-from-book-of-mormon-grammar/ ↩︎
G. Bruce Schaalje, "A Bayesian Cease-Fire in the Late War on the Book of Mormon," Interpreter Foundation, November 6, 2013. https://interpreterfoundation.org/blog-a-bayesian-cease-fire-in-the-late-war-on-the-book-of-mormon/ ↩︎
"Why Is the Timing of the Book of Mormon's Translation So Marvelous?" Scripture Central. https://scripturecentral.org/knowhy/why-is-the-timing-of-the-book-of-mormons-translation-so-marvelous ↩︎
Emma Smith, interview by Joseph Smith III, February 1879. Published in Saints' Herald 26 (October 1, 1879): 289–290. ↩︎
"No Revisions," Scripture Central. https://scripturecentral.org/evidence/book-of-mormon-evidence-no-substantive-revisions ↩︎
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/ ↩︎
John W. Welch, "A Masterpiece: Alma 36," in Rediscovering the Book of Mormon, ed. John W. Welch (Provo, UT: FARMS/Deseret Book, 1991), 114–131. ↩︎