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From the Book of Mormon, Mosiah 16:
8 But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.
9 He is the light and the life of the world; yea, a light that is endless, that can never be darkened; yea, and also a life which is endless, that there can be no more death.
10 Even this mortal shall put on immortality, and this corruption shall put on incorruption, and shall be brought to stand before the bar of God, to be judged of him according to their works whether they be good or whether they be evil—
11 If they be good, to the resurrection of endless life and happiness; and if they be evil, to the resurrection of endless damnation, being delivered up to the devil, who hath subjected them, which is damnation
12 Having gone according to their own carnal wills and desires; having never called upon the Lord while the arms of mercy were extended towards them; for the arms of mercy were extended towards them, and they would not; they being warned of their iniquities and yet they would not depart from them; and they were commanded to repent and yet they would not repent.
13 And now, ought ye not to tremble and repent of your sins, and remember that only in and through Christ ye can be saved?
14 Therefore, if ye teach the law of Moses, also teach that it is a shadow of those things which are to come—
15 Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father. Amen
You have that feeling because large chunks of this passage are, in substance and even in wording, built directly on King James Bible language—especially from 1 Corinthians 15, John’s Gospel, and judgment texts in Romans/Revelation.
Clear verbal echoes of the KJV
A few of the stronger overlaps:
- Mosiah 16:8 vs. 1 Corinthians 15
- BoM: “the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.”
- KJV: “Death is swallowed up in victory… O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:54–55).
The concepts (death’s sting, grave’s victory, death “swallowed up”) and the key nouns/verbs all sit in the same tight cluster, just rearranged and slightly repackaged to center “in Christ.”- Mosiah 16:10 vs. 1 Corinthians 15
- BoM: “this mortal shall put on immortality, and this corruption shall put on incorruption…”
- KJV: “this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.” (1 Corinthians 15:53–54).
That’s essentially the same sentence with the word order tweaked—“this mortal… this corruption…” instead of “this corruptible… this mortal…”.- Mosiah 16:9 vs. John 8
- BoM: “He is the light and the life of the world… a light that is endless… a life which is endless…”
- KJV: “I am the light of the world… shall have the light of life.” (John 8:12).
The title “light of the world” plus “light of life” language are Johannine; Mosiah blends and extends them in familiar King James diction.- Mosiah 16:10–11 vs. judgment passages
- BoM: people “brought to stand before the bar of God, to be judged… according to their works whether they be good or whether they be evil—If they be good, to the resurrection of endless life… if they be evil, to the resurrection of endless damnation…”
- KJV pattern: God “will render to every man according to his deeds” (Romans 2:6); “they were judged every man according to their works” (Revelation 20:12–13).
The “judged according to their works” formula and the good/evil bifurcation track classic KJV phrasing very closely.Add to that the overall King James style—“yea,” “even this mortal,” “endless damnation,” “the arms of mercy were extended,” “ought ye not to tremble and repent”—and it reads like it was composed by someone steeped in 17th‑century English Scripture, not by an alleged pre‑Christian writer in the Americas.
Why it feels like a paraphrase
So your instinct is picking up on three things at once:
- Direct phrase borrowing – Key lines are near‑verbatim or lightly edited from KJV 1 Corinthians 15 and Johannine language.
- Same theological sequence – Resurrection vocabulary, “death/swallowed up,” mortal/immortality, then standing before God to be judged according to works: it’s Paul and Revelation in miniature.
- KJV idiom throughout – The grammar, connective words, and cadence are all classic King James, not generic “scriptural” English.
Put simply, it feels like a KJV paraphrase because, at multiple points, it is.
Can you analyze and summarize what this LDS apologist is attempting to do at this URL: https://scripturecentral.org/archive/periodicals/journal-article/history-book-mormon-text-parts-5-and-6-volume-3-critical-text
He’s doing two things at once: genuine textual scholarship and damage‑control apologetics around the King James problem.
Big picture
In this BYU Studies piece, Royal Skousen is giving an overview of Parts 5 and 6 of his massive Critical Text project, focusing especially on Part 5: The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon. His goals there are to:
- Systematically map out exactly where and how the Book of Mormon uses the KJV.
- He uses computer n‑gram analysis to find all identical word strings between the Book of Mormon and the KJV, and sets an objective cutoff (16 identical words in a row) to define “literal quotations.” That yields 36 clear KJV blocks (Isaiah, Malachi, Sermon on the Mount, etc.), plus 83 shorter paraphrastic quotations.
- Show that, with one tiny exception, the BoM’s biblical language really does come from the King James tradition.
- He argues that virtually all biblical phrasing in the BoM matches the 1611 KJV (or very close predecessors like the Bishops’ Bible), and only one odd phrase (2 Nephi 12:16) appears to blend an older Coverdale/Septuagint‑type reading with the KJV—something he presents as a “great mystery” if Joseph is the author.bookofmormoncentral+1
- Argue that this doesn’t mean Joseph just copied from a Bible.
- He stresses that in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery’s spellings in the Isaiah sections look like normal dictation errors, not like copying from a printed KJV.
- He also points to paraphrastic blends of multiple KJV verses that, he says, would be awkward to produce by flipping through a Bible on the fly, to suggest a more “revelatory” process than simple plagiarism.
- Contain the “italics” argument and other textual problems.
- He quantifies how often KJV italicized words are changed or dropped in the BoM and concludes italics only explain about 23% of the differences; most changes have nothing to do with italics, so the old apologetic that the BoM “fixes the italics” is overstated.
- He catalogues cultural translations and outright translation errors in the KJV (e.g., “candle/candlestick,” “dry‑shod,” “satyr,” etc.) that the BoM simply reproduces, then frames these as anachronistic features of the translation, not as evidence against an ancient underlying text.
- Fold KJV dependence into his larger Early Modern English theory.
- Elsewhere in Volume 3, he and Stanford Carmack argue that the BoM’s grammar, vocabulary, and syntax match 16th–17th century Early Modern English, not Joseph’s 1820s dialect.
- Here he adds that the scriptural layer is likewise Early Modern—King James Bible English—so the whole translation package, he claims, points to some kind of non‑Joseph, archaic English “translation language” provided in the revelation process.
What he’s trying to accomplish apologetically
Put simply, Skousen is trying to take the main critical objection—“this is obviously KJV‑based 19th‑century Bible pastiche”—and turn it into a controlled, data‑driven story that still supports belief:
- He freely admits and precisely measures the KJV dependence, which gives him credibility and takes away the shock value of critics’ charts of parallels.
- He then reframes that dependence: not as evidence Joseph authored the text, but as evidence that God used Early Modern English (including KJV phraseology and even its quirks) as the vehicle for translating an ancient record.
- By highlighting one or two “mysterious” readings (like the Coverdale/Septuagint blend) that Joseph supposedly couldn’t have known, he tries to flip the script and make the KJV intertextuality look like a faith‑promoting puzzle rather than a fatal flaw.
So the article is:
- real, careful textual work on how the Book of Mormon and the KJV line up,
- wrapped in an interpretive frame whose purpose is to defuse the plagiarism charge and keep an ancient‑record, non‑Joseph origin on the table despite the overwhelming King James footprint.
LDS apologists carefully craft “damage control, upholding the “divine” origin of the Book of Mormon.
Taken together, Skousen’s project is a case study in how sophisticated LDS apologetics now functions as damage control rather than genuine reconsideration of the underlying claims. On the one hand, he concedes in meticulous detail what earlier generations of defenders often downplayed or denied: the Book of Mormon is saturated with King James Bible language, including long verbatim blocks, paraphrased clusters, and even inherited translation mistakes and cultural anachronisms. On the other hand, instead of letting that evidence raise the obvious historical question—whether Joseph Smith was simply composing in the only “scriptural” idiom he knew—Skousen carefully repackages it as proof of a mysterious, pre‑packaged Early Modern “translation language” that God supposedly dropped into Joseph’s mouth.
That move is not neutral scholarship. It is a deliberate choice to take every data point that naturally points toward a 19th‑century, KJV‑dependent origin and bend it back toward the prior conclusion that the Book of Mormon must be ancient and divinely given. The exhaustive charts, n‑gram counts, and critical‑text volumes give an impressive air of rigor, but the direction of travel never changes: admission, reframing, and preservation of the same truth‑claim at all costs. In that sense, Skousen’s work doesn’t resolve the KJV problem; it simply illustrates how far LDS apologetics is now willing to go to domesticate troubling evidence and keep the “divine” origin of the Book of Mormon safely beyond real scrutiny.
From Jeremy Runnell’s CES Letter: 1769 KJV Errors in Book of Mormon
Since the Mormon god was dictating to Joseph in his hat “word-by-word, we’re not moving along unless you get it right” dictation, it should be perfectly accurate and the original Book of Mormon should therefore be the perfect literary document. In other words, it should be just as Joseph claimed it was: “the most correct of any book on earth.”
But it’s not.
In reality, the original text and current text of the Book of Mormon is a mixture of nineteenth-century nonsense, plagiarism, and selected existing KJV scripture verses including its 1769 KJV edition errors as well as 17th century italics made by 17th century translators. The Book of Mormon is now the product of over 100,000 changes over the years – some insignificant and some significant.
Jeremy’s reference to the 100,000 changes was linked to the LDS FAIR site, which was live from 2014 through 2017, but is now only available on Archive.org:
Question: Why were textual changes made to the Book of Mormon over the years after it was first published?
The few significant modifications were made by the Prophet Joseph Smith to clarify the meaning of the text, not to change it. The published text of the Book of Mormon has been corrected and edited through its various editions. Many of these changes were made by Joseph Smith himself. Why was this done?
The authenticity of the Book of Mormon is not affected by the modifications that have been made to its text because the vast majority of those modifications are minor corrections in spelling, punctuation, and grammar. The few significant modifications were made by the Prophet Joseph Smith to clarify the meaning of the text, not to change it. This was his right as translator of the book.
These changes have not been kept secret. A discussion of them can be found in the individual articles linked below, and in the references listed below, including papers in BYU Studies and the Ensign.
Joseph Smith taught “the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion, and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than by any other book.”
There are over 100,000 insignificant changes that have been made to the Book of Mormon.
If one counts every difference in every punctuation mark in every edition of the Book of Mormon, the result is well over 100,000 changes. The critical issue is not the number of changes that have been made to the text, but the nature of the changes.
Most changes are insignificant modifications to spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and are mainly due to the human failings of editors and publishers. For example, the word meet — meaning “appropriate” — as it appears in 1 Nephi 7:1, was spelled “mete” in the first edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. (This is a common error made by scribes of dictated texts.) “Mete” means to distribute, but the context here is obvious, and so the spelling was corrected in later editions.
Some of these typographical errors do affect the meaning of a passage or present a new understanding of it, but not in a way that presents a challenge to the divinity of the Book of Mormon. One example is 1 Nephi 12:18, which in all printed editions reads “a great and a terrible gulf divideth them; yea, even the word of the justice of the Eternal God,” while the manuscript reads “the sword of the justice of the Eternal God.” In this instance, the typesetter accidentally dropped the s at the beginning of sword.
Most “Perfect Book,” indeed😉. Please tell us more about all those alleged copyist errors in the Bible.