Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited

The Evidence for Ancient Origins

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints view the Book of Mormon as scripture written by ancient prophets, while critics believe that it is a 19th-century fraud. The 15 essays in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited present the latest research by LDS scholars on the question in an effort to demonstrate that the weight of scholarly evidence is on the side of authenticity.

Part 1 contains essays dealing with accounts of how the book was produced in 1829 and 1830, with emphasis on the translation process and the witnesses who saw the plates. Part 2 takes a look at the logical structure of the authorship debate and reviews the history of alternative theories and criticisms of the Book of Mormon. Part 3 presents textual studies that demonstrate the plausibility of the Book of Mormon as an ancient book, and part 4 updates scholars’ attempts to understand the ancient cultural and geographic setting of the book in both the Old and New Worlds.

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About the Author

Noel B. Reynolds

Noel B. Reynolds is currently serving as a mission president for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint. He is a professor of political science at Brigham Young University. At BYU he has previously served as the executive director of the Institute for the Study and Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, associate academic vice president for undergraduate studies, the associate academic vice president for university education, and chair of the Department of Philosophy.

Table of Contents

  • Introduction
  • Part 1: The Nineteenth-Century Origin of the Book of Mormon
  • The Recovery of the Book of Mormon
  • Personal Writings of the Book of Mormon Witnesses
  • Translating the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original Manuscript
  • Part Two: The Logical Structure of the Authorship Debate
  • Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon?: The Critics and Their Theories
  • Is the Book of Mormon True?: Notes on the Debate
  • Complexity, Consistency, Ignorance, and Probabilities
  • Part Three: Letting the Text Speak for Itself
  • What Does Chiasmus in the Book of Mormon Prove?
  • On Verifying Wordprint Studies: Book of Mormon Authorship
  • How Many Nephites?: The Book of Mormon at the Bar of Demography
  • Power through Repetition: The Dynamics of Book of Mormon Parallelism
  • The Voice of an Angel
  • The Narrative of Zosimus (History of the Rechabites) and the Book of Mormon
  • Part Four: Locating the Book of Mormon Geographically and Culturally
  • Lehi's Arabian Journey Updated
  • The Book of Mormon as a Mesoamerican Record
  • The Importance of Warfare in Book of Mormon Studies
  • Index
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Publication Information

  • Subject: Book of Mormon
  • Publication Year: 1997
  • Language: English,
  • ISBN 13: 978-0934893251
  • Page Count: 584
  • Price: $ 19.95
  • Imprint: FARMS

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The views expressed here and in Maxwell Institute publications are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily represent the views of the Maxwell Institute, Brigham Young University, or The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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