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From the Book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

The Book of Mormon’s frequent use of the phrase “and it came to pass” has been the target of much ridicule. Mark Twain claimed this was Smith’s “pet phrase” and had Smith left it out, the Book of Mormon “would have been only a pamphlet”. Another critic asserted that the Book of Mormon, “is cursed with the clumsy, repetitious phrase ‘and it came to pass’ that appears hundreds of times in the book, on almost every page”. Neith Mark Twain nor Joseph Smith would have known in the nineteenth century just how important this phrase was to Book of Mormon authors.

The original manuscript of the Book of Mormon had no punctuation. Likewise, manuscripts prior to the tenth century typically had no punctuation. In both ancient Eqyptian and Hebrew, indicator phrases such as “it came to pass”, “and now”, “and thus”, were grammatically necessary to denote new thoughts or paragraphs. Since the Book of Mormon claims to be written in a modified Hebrew language and “reformed” or modified Egyptian characters it would be strange if it didn’t contain such phrases.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

 

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

By Michael R. Ash

In Alma 46 we read that Captain Moroni made a “banner of liberty” from his rent coat. In the original edition of the Book of Mormon we read: “And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had wrote upon the rent, and crying with a loud voice…” (italics added).

For clarification and to improve the grammar, the current edition of the Book of Mormon reads: And when Moroni had said these words, he went forth among the people, waving the rent part of his garment in the air, that all might see the writing which he had written upon the rent part, and crying with a loud voice…” (Alma 46:19; italics added).

Critics have laughed at the original version for more than a century. To them, this was one more proof that the unsophisticated Joseph Smith wrote –rather than translated –the Book of Mormon. How can a “rent” be written upon?

In Hebrew, the word qera’ –which is translated as a noun for a “rent part” –derives from the Hebrew qara’ which is the verb form and means “he rent, tore”. This word also translates in a manner that makes “rent” a noun –just as we find in Alma 46.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

 

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

Chiasmus was practically unknown in the United States when the Book of Mormon was published. However, if by chance, Joseph Smith had some sort of scholarly knowledge unavailable to the typical frontiersman, how did he find time –during the seventy or so days of translating –to create such complex chiastic structures? The presence of chiasmus in the Book of Mormon lends support to the claim that the book is based on an authentic ancient text.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

 

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

Dr. Daniel Peterson and Dr. Royal Skousen recently discovered that the Book of Mormon contains odd sentence structures utilizing the conditions if and and. In the original Book of Mormon manuscript, as dictated by Joseph Smith to Oliver Cowdery we find several examples, such as the following:

…yea and if he saith unto the earth move and it is moved…

…yea if he say unto the earth thou shalt go back that it lengthen out the day for many hours and it is done…

…and behold also if he saith unto the waters of the great deep be thou dried up and it is done…

In modern editions of the Book of Mormon,  these phrases were edited to sound more grammatically correct to English readers.

The if/and conditional sentence structure is also found in ancient Hebrew and biblical Hebrew. It is not surprising that the if/and sentences in the King James Version of the Bible, were also modified to make it sound more palatable to English readers.

As far as the research of Skousen and Peterson have shown, this authentic Hebrew sentence structure was not available in any other English text in Joseph Smith’s lifetime, but is a strong evidence for the Hebraic background of the Book of Mormon text.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

Critics generally claim that Joseph Smith either created (rather than dictated) The Book of Mormon, or that he plagiarized the text from some other nineteenth-century scholar. The invention of the computer has brought a new tool with which to test a document’s authorship. Stylometry (or word print studies) can detect an author’s fingerprint style by the individual word patterns they use for non-contextual words such as a, of, the, and it. These patterns are typically unconscious to the author and are not easily altered. Using stylometry, scholars have compared the writings of Joseph Smith, Oliver Cowdery, and other contemporaries to the authors in The Book of Mormon. According to the experts who conducted the research, word prints conclusively demonstrate that The Book of Mormon was written by many authors (there were twenty-four distinct word prints) –none of which matched Joseph Smith or the contemporaries tested.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the Book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

In 1976, during America’s bicentennial, Latter-day Saint historian Dr. Richard Bushman was preparing a speech and turned to The Book of Mormon to find some quotes that would resonate with the principles in our Constitution. To his surprise, he found that besides some superficial similarities, The Book of Mormon did not reflect typical U.S. political thought. Instead, Bushman found that the Nephite scripture was “an anomaly on the political scene of 1830”. He continues, “Instead of heroically resisting despots, the people of God fled their oppressors and credited God alone with deliverance. Instead of enlightened people overthrowing their kings in defense of their natural rights, the common people repeatedly raised up kings, and the prophets and the kings themselves had to persuade the people of the inexpediency of monarchy”. According to Bushman, The Book of Mormon is “strangely distant from the time and place of its publication” but it’s political attitudes are at home when we compare it to the history of the Israelites.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

More than a few critics seem to think that it would be easy to produce a work like the Book of Mormon. Are the critics right?

If so, then why hasn’t any critic attempted to produce something like it? Not only does the book incorporate profound doctrinal insights, but it also discusses politics, war, geography, and migrations, and includes various sermons and a variety of specific events involving distinct individuals.

The original manuscript was not polished or revised by Joseph Smith. His wife Emma, who served as a scribe for a time, said that when Joseph “stopped for any purpose at any time he would, when he commenced again, begin where he left off without any hesitation”. Witnesses also claimed that Joseph translated without notes, manuscripts, or reference books.

If the Book of Mormon is a work of fiction, there would be mistakes in chronology and the inter-connectivity of the many multiple events –based on Joseph’s method of translation. Yet those who have studied the Book of Mormon find that it is a complete and amazingly consistent text.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

By Michael R. Ash

By examining timelines, scholars estimate that the entire Book of Mormon — over a quarter million words and nearly six hundred pages in the 1830 edition — was translated in a span of sixty-five to seventy-five days. That’s an average of about seven to eight pages a day or over three thousands words a day. This is a miraculous achievement when we look at the complexity, depth, and profundity of what we find within the pages of this amazing book.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith

by Michael R. Ash

In the front of every copy of the Book of Mormon are the testimonies of the Book of Mormon Witnesses. Oliver Cowdery, David Whitmer, and Martin Harris signed a statement testifying that an angel of God showed them the plates and that they heard the voice of the Lord telling them that the record which Joseph translated is true. Eight other witnesses signed a statement testifying that Joseph had shown them the physical plates and that the plates were engraved with curious characters. None of these witnesses ever denied their testimonies. The very fact that eleven honest men testified as to having seen or handled the golden plates is considerable evidence for the truthfulness of the story as told by Joseph Smith.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.

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From the book: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting the Prophet Joseph Smith 

by Michael R. Ash

Before Joseph Smith showed the plates to the Book of Mormon witnesses, other family members were able to heft and feel the plates, although they were not able to see them. Witnesses estimated that they weighed about sixty pounds, and were fastened together by rings running through the back. They also said that they could feel and raise the individual leaves.

It is nearly beyond dispute that Joseph had some sort of metal plates in his possession. Logically, it makes more sense that Joseph had metal plates than it is to believe that all those who handled the plates were liars or deluded. After all, eleven other witnesses actually saw the uncovered golden plates. But what if the plates were forged from tin or lead –or some other lesser metal and painted to look like gold?

Martin Harris hefted the box with the plates inside and confirmed that there was something heavy and dense within the box. It was either gold or lead and, he added, “I knew that Joseph had not credit enough to buy so much lead”. The Smith’s were too poor to even afford that much tin. Even if Joseph had the money, someone would have had to purchase, fashion, paint, and even engrave the tin plates –without ever being noticed.

Michael R. Ash is the author of: Of Faith and Reason: 80 Evidences Supporting The Prophet Joseph Smith. He is the owner and operator of MormonFortress.com and is on the management team for FairMormon. He has been published in Sunstone, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, the Maxwell Institute’s FARMS Review, and is the author of Shaken Faith Syndrome: Strengthening One’s Testimony in the Face of Criticism and Doubt. He and his wife live in Ogden, Utah, and have three daughters.

Julianne Dehlin Hatton  is a broadcast journalist living in Louisville, Kentucky. She has worked as a News Director at an NPR affiliate, Radio and Television Host, and Airborne Traffic Reporter. She graduated with an MSSc from the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University in 2008. Julianne and her husband Thomas are the parents of four children.

Music for Faith and Reason is provided by Arthur Hatton.