Observations on Pseudo-Biblical Influence

Both LDS and non-LDS perspectives on Book of Mormon language have tended toward the pseudo-archaic or pseudo-biblical. Two commonly held beliefs are the following: (1) archaic Book of Mormon usage is not systematically different from King James language; (2) the earliest text is often defective in its implementation of archaic vocabulary and grammar. Many scholars believe Book of Mormon grammar is a flawed imitation of biblical usage. That conclusion, however, has been founded on insufficient grammatical and lexical study.

A number of LDS scholars believe that because Joseph Smith’s mind was saturated with biblical language, he could have produced the text of the Book of Mormon from a mixture of biblical language and his own dialect.8 Other commentators, whose affiliation is not always known, have drawn similar conclusions. Here is one observation made in 2013 by a blogger — who goes by the initials RT — on the influence that one pseudo-biblical writing might have had on the formulation of the Book of Mormon text:

In sum, linguistic and narrative elements of the [Book of Mormon] are probably descended, at least in part, from Gilbert Hunt’s pseudo-biblical account of the War of 1812. The relationship between these two literary works is relatively strong, suggesting that the book had quite a memorable impact on Joseph Smith. But Smith did not borrow directly from [The Late War] (at least for the majority of the narrative content) during the process of composing the [Book of Mormon].9

For purposes of determining possible influence on authorship, RT has focused on linguistic and narrative evidence. However, the linguistic evidence he has considered is not syntactic in character, and there is no discussion of possibly obsolete lexis. Instead, this commentator has concentrated on archaic phrasal and lexical evidence that is rather obviously biblical or that is contextual to a larger degree than syntactic structures are, which can be employed in a wide array of diverse contexts. Phrases and lexical items routinely identifiable as biblical are of course more susceptible to imitation. Moreover, they are also less likely to have been produced subconsciously than syntax, so they are of secondary importance in determining authorship influence, compared to more complex linguistic studies. Also, the narrative evidence RT has considered is, by its nature, weaker than substantive linguistic evidence from the domains of semantics, morphology, and syntax.

Here is another summarizing comment about the Book of Mormon which one can currently find online: “Joseph most likely grew up reading a school book called The Late War by Gilbert J. Hunt and it heavily influenced his writing of The Book of Mormon.”10 Again, a comparison of phrases and lexical usage shared between the Book of Mormon and The Late War led to this comment. Specifically, the two researchers responsible for this comment carried out n-gram comparisons between the Book of Mormon and more than 100,000 pre-1830 texts. A significant flaw in the comparisons they made was failing to incorporate many Early Modern English texts — regularized for spelling and morphology — in their large corpus.11 Nor is it clear that they used the critical text, the text closest to Joseph Smith’s 1829 dictation.12 In addition, as Benjamin McGuire pointed out in 2013 (using different language), n-gram analyses provide only a brute-force approach to the question of authorship, since they ignore constituent structure.13

To these points I would add that issues of lemmatization have been ignored as well. Lemmatization involves regularizing words with inflectional differences as equivalent variants of the same lexeme. And even many lemmatization efforts cannot remedy the inherent deficiencies of most n-gram analyses. For example, Nicholas Lesse’s translation language “do not cause hym, that he shuld performe . . .” (1550, EEBO A22686) is a syntactic match with “causing them that they should . . .” (3 Nephi 2:3). These are both ditransitive causative constructions with repeated pronominals. But such a correspondence isn’t caught by standard n-gram comparisons, nor by narrowly drawn lemmatized comparisons, so that competent linguistic analysis is ultimately needed to determine relevant syntactic matching.

The website that contains the above comment comparing The Late War to the Book of Mormon has a large quantity of material to digest, and the linguistic analysis is confined to phrasal and lexical elements, which have their interest but are contextual in many cases. If there were [Page 184]no syntax, morphosyntax, or obsolete lexis to study, then we would have to content ourselves with studying mostly contextual linguistic evidence, such as we find on this website. But there are other things that can be studied that are either more complex and less contextual or can be studied in a way that brings out relevant complexity. Hence, the choice of data and methodologies are quite important.

As McGuire mentions in his 2013 article, quoting Harold Love, the explosion of available textual data has made “intelligent selectivity” extremely important.14 Syntactic studies rank very high in terms of intelligent selectivity. (To this may be added studies of potentially obsolete lexis not undertaken here but soon to be available in Royal Skousen, The Nature of the Original Language. A substantially different version of this paper will be available in that two-part book as section 12.) Syntactic studies constitute a richer source of linguistic information and a more reliable data set on which to base conclusions about Book of Mormon authorship. One specific example is the study of relative-pronoun selection after human antecedents in earlier English, addressed below.

The aforementioned website liberally employs the ellipsis symbol (…), at times in lengthy or discontinuous passages. The way this symbol is used goes against customary practice in quite a few cases and can mislead the unaware. The casual reader is led to believe there is much more compact correspondence between the Book of Mormon and The Late War (and other texts) than there actually is. This analysis has been referred to by the CES letter, whose latest iteration links to the site rather than incorporating it in the body of the letter.15 A recent imitation of the CES letter provides the reader with a reprint of some of the color-coded comparisons that are heavy in ellipsis.16

Another short blog entry to consider is one titled “American Pseudobibles (and the Book of Mormon).” The author, John Turner, quotes Eran Shalev as suggesting that “the unique combination of the biblical form and style that the Book of Mormon shares with the pseudobiblical texts, as well as their distinctly American content, provide a case for seeing Smith’s book as meaningfully affiliated to that American mode of writing.”17 This view of things — that pseudo-biblical style and Book of Mormon style are not substantively distinguishable — is only based on superficial linguistic considerations. We must dig deeper before we can be confident that such a view is accurate.

Eran Shalev wrote the following at the end of his article on pseudo-biblicism:18

The tradition of writing in biblical style paved the way for the Book of Mormon by conditioning Americans to reading American texts, and texts about America, in biblical language. Yet the Book of Mormon, an American narrative told in the English of the King James Bible, has thrived long after Americans abandoned the practice of recounting their affairs in biblical language. It has thus been able to survive and flourish for almost two centuries, not because, but in spite of the literary ecology of the mid-nineteenth century and after. The Book of Mormon became a testament to a widespread cultural practice of writing in biblical English that could not accommodate to the monumental transformations America endured in the first half of nineteenth century. [emphasis added]

The character of the Book of Mormon’s English is a matter that demands special study, not unstudied assumptions. Before Skousen, no one had acknowledged and accepted this reality.

Just before final submission of this piece, I was alerted to a recent Purdue University dissertation by Gregory A. Bowen.19 Bowen’s thesis examines usage in 10 texts and two small corpora, with the focus on the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon. Because the net is cast wide and touches on several linguistic areas, this study is a preliminary one in relation to the Book of Mormon. Hunt’s The Late War is one of the 19th-century texts examined.

Bowen either begins with or comes to an expected academic conclusion.20 He doesn’t explore the possibility that a significant amount of Book of Mormon usage could be genuinely archaic, despite the existence of extra-biblical archaic markers occurring throughout the text. Although he mentions a few, he never pursues lines of inquiry that might have revealed true archaism. In short, there is good material in this thesis, but it doesn’t approach lexical and grammatical issues that might be dispositive of the authorship question.

Bowen concludes that some heavy usage of archaisms found in the Book of Mormon were biblical hypercorrections by Joseph Smith. In the case at hand, a hypercorrection is a presumed overuse by Joseph of a prestigious biblical form.21 The issue of biblical hypercorrection will be addressed at various points in this study.

One item of archaic vocabulary that Bowen tracked was the adjective wroth. This word is a strong marker of archaism because the EEBO database clearly shows that usage rates dropped off significantly during the first half of the early modern era. He classifies the Book of Mormon’s high-frequency wroth usage as a biblical hypercorrection, since its textual rate exceeds that of the King James Bible: 90 words per million (wpm) versus 64 wpm.22 In this case, however, the close synonym angry could have been considered as well.

If we include angry in calculations and determine a relative rate of archaism, we find that the King James Bible is 53 percent wroth (49 of 93) and that the Book of Mormon is only 26 percent wroth (24 of 93). As a result, even though the absolute rate of wroth in the Book of Mormon is greater than it is in the King James Bible, the Book of Mormon’s archaic wroth–angry rate is half that of the King James Bible. This extra bit of analysis — which recognizes the importance of also considering the close synonym angry — reveals that the Book of Mormon’s high rate of wroth is partly due to archaism and partly due to a higher textual frequency of the notion ‘angry.’

In summary, after duly considering a variety of evidence, a number of critics and researchers have concluded that the Book of Mormon isn’t genuinely archaic, and that its language is close to that of Gilbert J. Hunt’s The Late War and similarly styled texts. Some see direct influence from The Late War, others see indirect influence. Yet no one has drilled down to the foundational elements of style beyond shared lexical and phrasal usage in context and simple morphological studies; all have ignored independent archaic semantic usage, syntactic structure, and in-depth morphosyntactic research. Those are the things that can tell us most reliably and convincingly whether the Book of Mormon is similar to pseudo-biblical texts in terms of style and archaism. My primary concern in this study is with syntactic structure and morphosyntax. To my knowledge, a substantive syntactic comparison of the Book of Mormon with pseudo-biblical writings has never been performed. There is much to compare; I only touch on a few things here.

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The Pseudo-Biblical Texts Examined

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). These four pseudo-biblical texts are freely available in the WordCruncher library.

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