{"id":7335,"date":"2026-03-29T20:19:20","date_gmt":"2026-03-30T03:19:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/?p=7335"},"modified":"2026-03-29T20:30:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-30T03:30:13","slug":"why-do-i-have-the-distinct-feeling-that-the-book-of-mormon-is-in-part-a-paraphrase-of-the-king-james-bible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/2026\/03\/29\/why-do-i-have-the-distinct-feeling-that-the-book-of-mormon-is-in-part-a-paraphrase-of-the-king-james-bible\/","title":{"rendered":"Why do I have the distinct feeling that the Book of Mormon is, in part, a paraphrase of the King James Bible?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>NOTE:<\/strong> <\/span>These responses were delivered via Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine that transforms how you discover and interact with information. Simply ask any question, and it searches the web to deliver accessible, conversational answers backed by verifiable sources. Each response includes citations and links to original sources, enabling you to verify the information and explore topics in greater depth.<\/p>\n<p>My paid model, Perplexity Pro, is basically the \u201cpower\u2011user\u201d version of Perplexity AI. It still works like a smart search engine, but with extra muscle: it uses advanced AI models plus live web search to pull in up\u2011to\u2011date info and then explain it in normal language you can actually understand. You can ask it pretty much any question\u2014even complex, multi\u2011step ones\u2014and it will dig through lots of sources, piece everything together, and give you a clear, detailed answer instead of just a pile of links.<\/p>\n<p>The interface is simple: you type like you\u2019re texting a friend, and it replies with focused, easy\u2011to\u2011read explanations. When you ask Perplexity a question, it doesn\u2019t just guess from what it \u201calready knows\u201d\u2014it actively goes out and looks things up in real time. It hits a constantly updated index, adds live web results when needed, picks the most relevant and trustworthy sources, and then blends what it finds into a clear answer with clickable citations so you can see where everything came from. Because of this always\u2011on retrieval, Perplexity can include the latest news, stats, and research by default in the main app, in Pro Search, and even through its developer APIs\u2014something static AI models simply can\u2019t do on their own.<\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>From the Book of Mormon, Mosiah 16:<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>8 But there is a resurrection, therefore the grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>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.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>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\u2014<\/em><br \/>\n<em>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<\/em><br \/>\n<em>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.<\/em><br \/>\n<em>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?<\/em><br \/>\n<em>14 Therefore, if ye teach the law of Moses, also teach that it is a shadow of those things which are to come\u2014<\/em><br \/>\n<em>15 Teach them that redemption cometh through Christ the Lord, who is the very Eternal Father. Amen<\/em><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>You have that feeling because large chunks of this passage are, in substance and even in wording, built directly on King James Bible language\u2014especially from 1 Corinthians 15, John\u2019s Gospel, and judgment texts in Romans\/Revelation.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><strong><a name=\"clear-verbal-echoes-of-the-kjv\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000080;\"> Clear verbal echoes of the KJV<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>A few of the stronger overlaps:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Mosiah 16:8 vs. 1 Corinthians 15<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>BoM: \u201cthe grave hath no victory, and the sting of death is swallowed up in Christ.\u201d<\/li>\n<li>KJV: \u201cDeath is swallowed up in victory\u2026 O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?\u201d (1 Corinthians 15:54\u201355).<br \/>\nThe concepts (death\u2019s sting, grave\u2019s victory, death \u201cswallowed up\u201d) and the key nouns\/verbs all sit in the same tight cluster, just rearranged and slightly repackaged to center \u201cin Christ.\u201d<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mosiah 16:10 vs. 1 Corinthians 15<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>BoM: \u201cthis mortal shall put on immortality, and this corruption shall put on incorruption\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<li>KJV: \u201cthis corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality.\u201d (1 Corinthians 15:53\u201354).<br \/>\nThat\u2019s essentially the same sentence with the word order tweaked\u2014\u201cthis mortal\u2026 this corruption\u2026\u201d instead of \u201cthis corruptible\u2026 this mortal\u2026\u201d.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mosiah 16:9 vs. John 8<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>BoM: \u201cHe is the light and the life of the world\u2026 a light that is endless\u2026 a life which is endless\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<li>KJV: \u201cI am the light of the world\u2026 shall have the light of life.\u201d (John 8:12).<br \/>\nThe title \u201clight of the world\u201d plus \u201clight of life\u201d language are Johannine; Mosiah blends and extends them in familiar King James diction.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><strong>Mosiah 16:10\u201311 vs. judgment passages<\/strong>\n<ul>\n<li>BoM: people \u201cbrought to stand before the bar of God, to be judged\u2026 according to their works whether they be good or whether they be evil\u2014If they be good, to the resurrection of endless life\u2026 if they be evil, to the resurrection of endless damnation\u2026\u201d<\/li>\n<li>KJV pattern: God \u201cwill render to every man according to his deeds\u201d (Romans 2:6); \u201cthey were judged every man according to their works\u201d (Revelation 20:12\u201313).<br \/>\nThe \u201cjudged according to their works\u201d formula and the good\/evil bifurcation track classic KJV phrasing very closely.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Add to that the overall\u00a0<strong>King James style<\/strong>\u2014\u201cyea,\u201d \u201ceven this mortal,\u201d \u201cendless damnation,\u201d \u201cthe arms of mercy were extended,\u201d \u201cought ye not to tremble and repent\u201d\u2014and it reads like it was composed by someone steeped in 17th\u2011century English Scripture, not by an alleged pre\u2011Christian writer in the Americas.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><strong><a name=\"why-it-feels-like-a-paraphrase\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000080;\"> Why it feels like a paraphrase<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p>So your instinct is picking up on three things at once:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Direct phrase borrowing<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Key lines are near\u2011verbatim or lightly edited from KJV 1 Corinthians 15 and Johannine language.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Same theological sequence<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 Resurrection vocabulary, \u201cdeath\/swallowed up,\u201d mortal\/immortality, then standing before God to be judged according to works: it\u2019s Paul and Revelation in miniature.<\/li>\n<li><strong>KJV idiom throughout<\/strong>\u00a0\u2013 The grammar, connective words, and cadence are all classic King James, not generic \u201cscriptural\u201d English.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>Put simply, it feels like a KJV paraphrase because, at multiple points, it is.<\/strong><\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Can you analyze and summarize what this LDS apologist is attempting to do at this URL: <a href=\"https:\/\/scripturecentral.org\/archive\/periodicals\/journal-article\/history-book-mormon-text-parts-5-and-6-volume-3-critical-text\">https:\/\/scripturecentral.org\/archive\/periodicals\/journal-article\/history-book-mormon-text-parts-5-and-6-volume-3-critical-text<\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p>He\u2019s doing two things at once: genuine textual scholarship and damage\u2011control apologetics around the King James problem.<\/p>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><strong><a name=\"big-picture\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000080;\">Big picture<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><em>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 <strong>Part 5: The King James Quotations in the Book of Mormon<\/strong>. His goals there are to:<\/em><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><em><strong>Systematically map out exactly where and how the Book of Mormon uses the KJV.<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>He uses computer n\u2011gram 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 \u201cliteral quotations.\u201d That yields 36 clear KJV blocks (Isaiah, Malachi, Sermon on the Mount, etc.), plus 83 shorter paraphrastic quotations.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Show that, with one tiny exception, the BoM\u2019s biblical language really does come from the King James tradition.<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>He argues that virtually all biblical phrasing in the BoM matches the 1611 KJV (or very close predecessors like the Bishops\u2019 Bible), and only one odd phrase (2 Nephi 12:16) appears to blend an older Coverdale\/Septuagint\u2011type reading with the KJV\u2014something he presents as a \u201cgreat mystery\u201d if Joseph is the author.bookofmormoncentral+1<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Argue that this doesn\u2019t mean Joseph just copied from a Bible.<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>He stresses that in the original manuscript Oliver Cowdery\u2019s spellings in the Isaiah sections look like normal dictation errors, not like copying from a printed KJV.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>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 \u201crevelatory\u201d process than simple plagiarism.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Contain the \u201citalics\u201d argument and other textual problems.<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>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 \u201cfixes the italics\u201d is overstated.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>He catalogues <strong>cultural translations and outright translation errors in the KJV<\/strong> (e.g., \u201ccandle\/candlestick,\u201d \u201cdry\u2011shod,\u201d \u201csatyr,\u201d etc.) that the BoM simply reproduces, then frames these as anachronistic features of the translation, not as evidence against an ancient underlying text.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li><em><strong>Fold KJV dependence into his larger Early Modern English theory.<\/strong><\/em>\n<ul>\n<li><em>Elsewhere in Volume 3, he and Stanford Carmack argue that the BoM\u2019s grammar, vocabulary, and syntax match <strong>16th\u201317th century Early Modern English, not Joseph\u2019s 1820s dialect<\/strong>.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>Here he adds that the scriptural layer is likewise Early Modern\u2014King James Bible English\u2014so the whole translation package, he claims, points to some kind of non\u2011Joseph, archaic English \u201ctranslation language\u201d provided in the revelation process.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<h2 class=\"western\"><strong><a name=\"what-hes-trying-to-accomplish-apologetically\"><\/a><span style=\"color: #000080;\"> What he\u2019s <em>trying<\/em> to accomplish apologetically<\/span><\/strong><\/h2>\n<p><em>Put simply, Skousen is trying to <strong>take the main critical objection\u2014\u201cthis is obviously KJV\u2011based 19th\u2011century Bible pastiche\u201d<\/strong>\u2014and turn it into a controlled, data\u2011driven story that still supports belief:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>He freely admits and precisely measures the KJV dependence, which gives him credibility and takes away the shock value of critics\u2019 charts of parallels.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>He then <strong>reframes that dependence<\/strong>: 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.<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>By highlighting one or two \u201cmysterious\u201d readings (like the Coverdale\/Septuagint blend) that Joseph supposedly couldn\u2019t have known, he tries to flip the script and make the KJV intertextuality look like a faith\u2011promoting puzzle rather than a fatal flaw.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><em>So the article is:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><em>real, careful textual work on how the Book of Mormon and the KJV line up,<\/em><\/li>\n<li><em>wrapped in an interpretive frame whose purpose is to <strong>defuse the plagiarism charge and keep an ancient\u2011record, non\u2011Joseph origin on the table<\/strong> despite the overwhelming King James footprint.<\/em><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/blockquote>\n<h3><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>LDS apologists carefully craft &#8220;damage control, upholding the &#8220;divine&#8221; origin of the Book of Mormon.<\/strong><\/span><\/h3>\n<blockquote><p><em>Taken together, Skousen\u2019s 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\u2014whether Joseph Smith was simply composing in the only \u201cscriptural\u201d idiom he knew\u2014Skousen carefully repackages it as proof of a mysterious, pre\u2011packaged Early Modern \u201ctranslation language\u201d that God supposedly dropped into Joseph\u2019s mouth.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>That move is not neutral scholarship. It is a deliberate choice to take every data point that naturally points toward a 19th\u2011century, KJV\u2011dependent origin and bend it back toward the prior conclusion that the Book of Mormon must be ancient and divinely given. The exhaustive charts, n\u2011gram counts, and critical\u2011text volumes give an impressive air of rigor, but the direction of travel never changes: admission, reframing, and preservation of the same truth\u2011claim at all costs. In that sense, Skousen\u2019s work doesn\u2019t resolve the KJV problem; it simply illustrates how far LDS apologetics is now willing to go to domesticate troubling evidence and keep the \u201cdivine\u201d origin of the Book of Mormon safely beyond real scrutiny.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>From Jeremy Runnell&#8217;s CES Letter: <a href=\"https:\/\/cesletter.org\/1769-kjv-errors\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>1769 KJV Errors in Book of Mormon<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>Since the Mormon god was dictating to Joseph in his hat \u201cword-by-word, we\u2019re not moving along unless you get it right\u201d 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: \u201cthe most correct of any book on earth.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>But it\u2019s not.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>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 \u2013 some insignificant and some significant.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Jeremy&#8217;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 <a href=\"https:\/\/web.archive.org\/web\/20141004060133\/https:\/\/en.fairmormon.org\/Book_of_Mormon\/Textual_changes\/Why_were_these_changes_made\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"><strong>Archive.org<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>Question: Why were textual changes made to the Book of Mormon over the years after it was first published?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>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?<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>Joseph Smith taught &#8220;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.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>There are over 100,000 insignificant changes that have been made to the Book of Mormon.<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n<p><em>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.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em><span style=\"color: #800000;\"><strong>Most changes are insignificant modifications to spelling, grammar, and punctuation, and are mainly due to the human failings of editors and publishers.<\/strong><\/span> For example, the word meet \u2014 meaning &#8220;appropriate&#8221; \u2014 as it appears in 1 Nephi 7:1, was spelled &#8220;mete&#8221; in the first edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. (This is a common error made by scribes of dictated texts.) &#8220;Mete&#8221; means to distribute, but the context here is obvious, and so the spelling was corrected in later editions.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><em>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 &#8220;a great and a terrible gulf divideth them; yea, even the word of the justice of the Eternal God,&#8221; while the manuscript reads &#8220;the sword of the justice of the Eternal God.&#8221; In this instance, the typesetter accidentally dropped the s at the beginning of sword.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Most <span style=\"color: #000080;\"><strong>&#8220;Perfect Book,&#8221;<\/strong><\/span> indeed\ud83d\ude09. Please tell us more about all those alleged copyist errors in the Bible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>NOTE: These responses were delivered via Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine that transforms how you discover and interact with information. Simply ask any question, and it searches the web to deliver accessible, conversational answers backed by verifiable sources. Each response includes citations and links to original sources, enabling you to verify the information and explore&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7336,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[47,44,45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-of-mormon","category-latter-day-saints","category-mormonism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/V2pa9.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7335"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7335\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7339,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7335\/revisions\/7339"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7336"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novus2.com\/righteouscause\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}