An anachronism is something that appears in a text prior to the time that it could have been present. When a clear anachronism is found in any document claiming to be an original historical record, it immediately marks the document as false. The reason is obvious. No writer could know to include something that had not yet been invented or had not yet happened. Many have assumed that anachronisms in the Book of Mormon should similarly prove that it must be false, and it is a modern text only posting as an ancient one. That would be as true for the Book of Mormon as it is for any other text if the Book of Mormon claimed to be an ancient text, but it does not. It claims to be a translation of an ancient text, and that is a very important difference. The fact that we have the Book of Mormon in translation doesn’t mean that we can ignore the proposed anachronisms, but it does mean that we can, and should, carefully look to see if there are reasonable explanations for the proposed anachronisms.

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SHIFTING MEANINGS OF WORDS

The case of the use of chariots in the Book of Mormon presents another issue in translation in addition to the one mentioned above. All languages evolve over time as vocabulary is added and the meanings associated with words shift. Modern readers see the word chariot has also been applied to four-wheeled conveyances—specifically, the very wheeled figurines from Mesoamerica that some have used as support for pre-Columbian *chariots*.

William Henry Holmes (1846-1933), an anthropologist and archaeologist, recorded, “[Désiré] Charnay [1828-1915] obtained from an ancient cemetery at Tenenpanco, Mexico, a number of toy chariots of terra cotta, presumably buried with the body of a child, some of which retained their wheels.” Holmes had no problem using the same word that Charnay had used in his original text. Holmes and Charnay wrote that there were chariots in Mesoamerica. They did not mean Old World war chariots. The use of chariots in the Book of Mormon translation need not either. Sometimes the translation anachronism might partially depend on changes in English meanings that make it appear that something was more anachronistic than it was at the time that Joseph translated the Book of Mormon.

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AN IMPERFECT TRANSLATION

There is no way to know precisely what was on the plates. Nevertheless, the very fact that we have the Book of Mormon in translation requires that we look at anachronisms in the text carefully. What at first may appear like a clear mistake, when studied carefully, may just as rationally be interpreted as a rendering of an unknown element to its closest known representation in the language and understanding of the author or translator. In the vast majority of the cases, it is reasonable that we are seeing a translation anachronism rather than a historical anachronism, and translation anachronisms do not impugn the authenticity of the original.