Linguistics and the Book of Mormon
[3][4][5][6][7] Some proponents of the Book of Mormon have published claims of stylistic forms that they think Joseph Smith and his contemporaries were unlikely to have known about, in particular things they think are similar to Egyptian and Hebrew.
Roberts noted that linguistic evidence among the Native American peoples does not support the Book of Mormon narrative, inasmuch as the diverse language stocks and dialects that exist would not have had enough time to develop from a single language dating from A.D. 400 (the approximate date of the conclusion of the Book of Mormon record).
In Guns, Germs, and Steel, anthropologist Jared Diamond writes that “had any food-producing Native American peoples succeeded in spreading far with their crops and livestock and rapidly replacing hunter-gatherers over a large area,[a] they would have left legacies of easily recognized language families, as in Eurasia,” which did not occur.
These anachronisms include words that represent concepts that did not exist in the Americas between 2500 BC and AD 400, or in ancient Israel and Judah.
According to Blomberg, 2 Nephi 31:13 includes overt references to Acts 2:38, Matthew 3:11, 1 Corinthians 13:1, and were most likely written with their direct influence in mind.
Blomberg summarizes his overall position on Book of Mormon anachronisms as follows: "Indeed, the entire Book of Mormon abounds with explicit references to Christ, to his life and ministry and to the three persons of the Godhead long before New Testament times ... even though none of these concepts or terms ever appear in these forms in the Old Testament or any other ancient Jewish literature.
[26]Some claim writings in the form of chiasmus can also be found in the Doctrine and Covenants and the Pearl of Great Price, two other works of scripture in the LDS canon that were dictated by Smith.
[citation needed] Charles G. Kroupa and Richard C. Shipp are notable for publishing arguments for chiasmus in the Doctrine and Covenants in 1972.
They concluded that none of the Book of Mormon selections they studied resembled writings of any of the suggested nineteenth-century authors, including Joseph Smith.
[35] Jerald and Sandra Tanner challenged these findings on various points, most notably questioning the reliability of the data sources used and the methodology of the "wordprint analysis".
[37] A later stylometric study was undertaken by Mormon researcher John Hilton and his non-LDS colleagues at Berkeley,[38] who "went to great pains to immunize the methodology from criticism" through the use of control tests.
[39] Hilton concluded that, if wordprinting is a valid technique, then this analysis suggests that it is "statistically indefensible" to claim that Smith, Oliver Cowdery, or Solomon Spalding wrote the 30,000 words in the Book of Mormon attributed to Nephi and Alma.
[40] In a peer-reviewed study using a traditional authorship method and a new pattern-classification technique, several researchers at Stanford University concluded that Sidney Rigdon, Solomon Spalding, and Oliver Cowdery were more likely to have written the book out of a pool of authors that also included Parley P. Pratt and two statistical control authors (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Joel Barlow).
[43] In a 1991 study for the journal History and Computing, non-Mormon David Holmes used a multivariate technique to analyze the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine of the Covenants.
He noted that “the style of [Smith’s] 'prophetic voice' as evidenced by the main cluster of the textual samples studied, differs from the style of his personal writings or dictations of a personal nature.”[44] Apologists have argued that apparent similarities between proper names found in the Book of Mormon, and names from known ancient civilizations (which presumably Smith would not have known about) can be an argument for the book's ancient historicity.
[45] Critics have pointed out that many of the names in the Book of Mormon that are not drawn from the King James Bible are found in the local environment around Palmyra, New York, and would have been known to Smith.
[46][47] Richard Packham has pointed out that several Biblical Hebrew names, including "Aaron",[48] "Ephraim",[49] and "Levi"[50] are listed as Jaredites in the Book of Ether.
