The Book of Mormon

Does the Book of Mormon use the King James Bible?

Readers of the Book of Mormon notice familiar language when they compare it with the Bible. Some passages resemble the wording of the King James Version (KJV).

Sometimes the Book of Mormon echoes the King James Bible in its general wording and style. In other places it reproduces clusters of distinctive phrases that are thematically linked. And in some passages it quotes long sections of the Bible directly, including material from Isaiah, Malachi, and the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew.

This raises a simple question. Why does a seventeenth century English Bible appear in a text that claims to be a translation of ancient records?

Latter day Saint scholars themselves have acknowledged the scope of this issue. Grant Hardy observes that “Latter-day Saints have long been wary of acknowledging just how much of the language of the Book of Mormon is derived from the Bible.”1

The Nature of the Problem

The difficulty becomes clearer when specific examples are considered. Hardy notes that some passages in the Book of Mormon appear to rely on biblical texts that were written centuries after the time period the book claims to describe.

Any quotations in the Book of Mormon from biblical writings composed after 600 BC are anachronistic, potentially challenging both the book’s historicity and its credibility. This is all the more so when the borrowed expressions appear in the exact words of the King James Version of 1611. Nonbelievers simply view the English Bible as one of Joseph Smith’s sources, while Latter-day Saints look instead for more apologetic explanations. Although a case can be made, for example, for the resurrected Jesus’ knowledge of the contents of the gospels, and even perhaps more tenuously for Nephi’s citations of Second Isaiah (as we saw in Chapter 2), it is difficult to explain how it is that Moroni and his father before him had access to writings attributed to the apostle Paul. Believers might assume that some of the “things” Jesus himself shared with Moroni when he spoke with him “face to face, in plain humility” (Ether 12:39), included the contents of particular New Testament epistles. But regardless of the explanation, Ether 12 is written as if Moroni is as fully familiar with the text of Hebrews as he is with Nephi’s or Mormon’s writings.2

Hardy also notes that Moroni appears to draw on multiple sources at once, weaving together language and ideas from different texts.

Moroni was “incorporating clusters of distinctive phrases as well as argumentative structures from several thematically and verbally linked source texts, and then integrating these varied allusions into a coherent whole.”3

Proposals

Latter day Saint scholars have proposed several ways to understand these similarities. Hardy summarizes several possibilities:

(1) "dictated a translation that had been produced in the spirit world by God, angels, or even Nephi himself, all of whom could have known the King James Version intimately by 1829.

(2) "Nephi might have updated and revised his book posthumously.

(3) "Joseph Smith might have with divine approbation expanded the core text of Nephi's writings, or he could have been inspired to open his Bible and make corrections as he read it aloud.

(4) "Or the Isaiah chapters in the Book of Mormon may be an example of a translation of 'dynamic equivalence' rather than 'formal correspondence'; that is to say, the Brass Plates may have included a version of Isaiah that was recognizable but non standard, which is precisely what the Book of Mormon provided to nineteenth century Americans.

(5) "We might even hypothesize that God could even have directly placed in the Brass Plates writings still to be created in the future."4

See also

References

  1. Grant Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader’s Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), chap. 9, n. 5.

  2. Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, 255.

  3. Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, 255.

  4. Hardy, Understanding the Book of Mormon, chap. 3, n. 31.