Translating a 600-page book from an unknown language into 17th century English

and all of that accomplished by a 23-year-old frontiersman in less than three months who had less than three years of formal education.

The translation of the Book of Mormon coming up next on The Joseph Smith Papers.

KJZZ television in cooperation with the Church History Department of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints presents this weekly series highlighting the research of scholars and historians as they prepare for the publication of The Joseph Smith Papers.

And now your host, Glenn Rawson.

Most translators of scripture today consider themselves as efficient if they can accomplish one page of text per day. Joseph Smith translated as many as 10 pages per day.

Now, that’s one of the reasons that our scholars have said on more than one occasion.

The translation of the Book of Mormon was a marvelous work and a wonder. And today they're going to tell us why.

Now, for perspective,

consider this statement from Dr. Steven Harper that we’ve shown you before.

They wrote at a pace that is staggering.

They started on the seventh day of April, 1829. We believe, and all evidence suggests, they are finished with the translation by the end of June 1829. You think about that.

May or April 7th, end of June, 1829. That's an impressive piece of work

and there is not any evidence in the manuscript of redrafting of going back, of fixing, of,

you know, polishing, not any. It seems, in fact, like a stream of consciousness from beginning to end.

And the original manuscript shows all the evidence of being a dictation. When we were looking at that page, that manuscript page from the Book of Mormon, you may have noticed that there not a stitch of punctuation in it—

just one stream of of consciousness as Joseph translates, dictates and Oliver and the others try to scribe as fast as they can day after day, said Oliver Cowdery, uninterrupted. And so I think it's absolutely fascinating that the original manuscript of the Book of Mormon is itself the most profound testimony that the book is what Joseph says it is.

Dr. Royal Skousen is a professor of English at Brigham Young University, and he has spent 20 years studying and analyzing the manuscripts of the Book of Mormon and the publications that came from it. He’s a wealth of information.

So it was a very laborious kind of thing. And

we can estimate that they probably spent six to eight hours a day doing this work. And at six to eight hours a day, you can do the Book of Mormon

in about 70 to 80 days. He’s using these interpreters that came with the plates, or he sometimes used a stone that he had in his possession called the seer stone to do the translation. And so this would probably be very stressful on him. And he has to read it off, and the scribe has to hear it,

and then the scribe has to write it down, and then the scribe will read it back, and Joseph has to check it.

And it must have been a very tiring process.

And so, just the physical effort was something quite,

I think, amazing.

Oliver Cowdrey and some others scribe for Joseph while he was translating; however, it was discovered by Dr. Skousen that there was a time when Joseph wrote part of the text himself,

and that was evidently unusual.

Well, we’re not going to see this very well here,

but in the middle, right about here,

there are 28 words written in Joseph Smith’s hand.

And Dean Jessee was telling me that this is, at least at the time when he said this, was the earliest known actual handwriting of Joseph Smith.

And so, for 28 words, Joseph Smith took over.

And a lot of people have speculated on this, since it was, since I discovered this, that maybe this was a place where Oliver Cowdery got a chance to try and translate. Now, the evidence is against this.

It is against it. It is not a case of this, I believe. For a long time I was trying to figure out what would motivate Joseph Smith to take over for 28 words.

One possibility that needs to be considered is that Emma and others said that when Joseph Smith would stop

dictating for a day or for a time and came back,

he never had to be told where to start again.

Now, what this suggests is that if Joseph Smith is seing something,

that whatever he's seen, he's got to finish reading it off,

he can’t leave it in the middle because, when he comes back,

it’ll be the next slide, shall we say,

and would be missing words.

So there seems to be an idea here that it's actually in the middle of a discourse.

It’s not a natural place where you would say, “OK, Oliver, it’s your turn. You can try.”

I don't think that happened at all.

But for a long time, I was trying to figure out what would cause Joseph Smith to stop letting Oliver be the scribe and take over for himself.

And what it seems to be is, OK,

he had 28 more words in what he was viewing. He had to get them down.

And Dean Jessee pointed out that when we look at these 28 words, they looked like they’ve been written by Joseph Smith and groups of like three and four words at a time.

It’s like Joseph is looking,

and then he writes three to four words,

then he goes back and looks. Because it’s really interesting, there’s a little bit of extra space every three to four words.

And so . . . but what’s motivating this?

Well, it turns out four lines earlier,

Oliver is writing down what Joseph Smith is is dictating, and this is what he writes: “They had become exceeding dissenting.”

And it's really weird because it doesn't really quite fit in

and the word “dissenting” at the end is almost just, sort of— trialed off—trailed off.

It’s hard to even say it is “dissenting,” but it looks like it’s “dissenting.” That’s what I speculated.

Well, what’s happening here is Oliver Cowdery is falling asleep.

That’s what I think happened.

And finally he says, “Joseph, I just can’t keep going.” Right.

And so Joseph, I believe, said, “OK, I’ll finish up this and we’ll take a break.”

So that’s what I think we’ve got here. We don't have Oliver Cowdery doing his attempt to do that.

It’s . . . we sometimes don’t realize we just look at this document, say, you know, this really took physical effort.

Well, six to eight hours of just writing is difficult enough to do. Yeah. For translator as well as scribe,

it's a taxing work. Now,

there are many who have wondered how it was that Joseph actually translated the Book of Mormon. The answer is, we don’t know.

And the reason we don’t know, Joseph didn’t tell us.

There's an interesting event that took place a year and a half after the church was organized,

which I think gives some dimension to this.

On October the 25th, 1831, in a little village called Orange, just 13 miles south and and west of Kirtland,

there was a small conference held. In this conference. there was Joseph Smith,

the three witnesses to the Book of Mormon,

several of the eight witnesses to the Book of Mormon, including Joseph's own father.

There were several who would become charter members of the First Presidency and the Quorum of the Twelve a little bit later. This was the inner circle.

Joseph’s brother Hyrum was there.

Hyrum asked Joseph, and we have the minutes of this meeting so we can recount the story.

Joseph’s brother Hyrum said to him, “Tell us

how you came to translate the Book of Mormon?

How did it happen?” And Joseph said to him,

“It’s not for the world to know.”

If there was ever a time to tell that story,

especially in company with people who had had visionary experiences with him, that would have been a time to tell it,

but he chose not to. In fact, he never did tell that story beyond what I've just described to you. The several who tried to weigh in on how the translation took place were observers.

We just don't get it from Joseph Smith.

All right. so we don’t know exactly how Joseph translated the Book of Mormon. But from the manuscripts and the evidence,

Dr. Skousen has been able to draw some

pretty compelling conclusions.

There are basically two theories that people have proposed about

how Joseph Smith used the interpreters or the seer stone. And the evidence is really quite strong that Joseph Smith saw an actual text in English,

whether it was literally just in his mind or whether it was right in the instrument,

we can’t be sure of that. I think it was actually in the instrument, like a screen,

but, you know, I don’t know that. But . . .

and he could see a certain amount.

There's evidence that he could see at least 28 to 30 words at a time. That’s 28 words that we have here.

There are some other mistakes that were made by the scribe anticipating getting ahead,

sort of skipping some material because Joseph Smith is sometimes reading off too much.

So there's at least 30 words that he could see at a time.

And a lot of people look at this and say, “Well, was

he really having to depend upon these instruments to do this?”

And I think there's a really excellent example from Martin Harris. When they were working on the 116 pages, the portion that was lost, this would have been in the spring of 1828,

Martin says, later on his life, he was recounting how they had gotten tired

and they had decided to take a break.

So they went out to the Susquehanna River, they were down there in Harmony

and they were throwing rocks, you know, skipping rocks and various things. And Martin looks down there and he sees a stone that looks like the seer stone.

It looked identical to it,

so he puts it in his pocket and goes back in the house

and they’re going to start up again, and Martin

switches in the stone that he just picked up.

And so Joseph starts trying to read it, to read using this new instrument and nothing.

And Martin said for a whole minute, he sits there staring, and then finally Joseph says, “What’s wrong, Martin? It’s all as dark as Egypt?”

And then, you know, Martin confessed and gave him the real stone and so forth. And Joseph says, “Why are you doing this?

Why did you do this?” And Martin says, “Well, everybody in the neighborhood says you're just making it up.

You know, you’re just . . . this is just a show.

And I wanted to see if it really was.” He tested him again.

And if you think about it, if Joseph Smith had been making up this text as he went along, what would have happened? He would’ve just kept right along. He would have kept going on.

But it didn't happen that way.

Now, Joseph Smith later said he didn’t need the instrument,

actually, the seer stone. He gave to Oliver Cowdery. After he got done with the Book of Mormon translation, he gave it to Oliver and says, “I don’t need this anymore for revelations.”

But during the Book of Mormon, he did need it. I might say that the other theory of the system that Joseph Smith used was that he didn't get specific

words, but that he got ideas in his mind—General impressions— and that he was to put it into his own words. Right.

The main evidence that people provide for this is that

the English of the 1830 edition is not standard English.

And the idea is, well, if it came from God, it would be in standard English.

God speaks good English, not dialectal English. Right?

What people that propose that are actually saying is something like, “If God spoke directly, word for word, it’s got to be in my correct English.”

Whereas it could really be in the person's own English.

And so I don't find that to be a particularly strong argument.

But other arguments, for instance, the spelling of names would seem to indicate Joseph actually had to see in letters the spelling of names.

Well, in any event, we have this wonderful example here.

Can't read it. We’ve talked at previous times about these . . .

this manuscript being fragmented and why it's, pieced together the way it was.

It was placed in the cornerstone of the Nauvoo house in October of 1841.

Joseph Smith felt like he wanted to preserve this manuscript

and he mistakenly thought that putting it in the cornerstone would be a safe place. It turned out not to be.

That’s right. And 42 or, let’s see,

41 years later, Lewis Bidamon, the second husband of Emma,

was trying to build up the house, or the Nauvoo house, make it into a different structure, and he came upon the cornerstone. And he found what was left of the original manuscript.

The seal had broken— it had a lead seal— and water moisture got in, then mold, and you can see where the mold just ate away parts of this. OK, so this gives you an idea of how fragmented and how, you know,

deteriorated the manuscript was. And we only have about 28 percent of the original manuscript.

And so the rest of it's basically lost and there probably some larger portions that were

given out by Bidamon, but we haven’t been able to find much of that. When Oliver, as Oliver Cowdery described, this is from Helaman

chapter one verses six through 17. And down here, when Oliver

was confronted with the name “Coriantumr.”

So he’s got to spell this, and he first just spells it out. And he spells it like we do at the beginning, but at the end he spelled it T-U-M-N-E-R.

Which is phonetically how it sounds.

Yeah, and so you’d say, OK, that’s OK.

But then in the manuscript it is crossed out,

completely crossed out and in line.

Right after it, and it wasn't done later where you put the correct spelling above or below it, it was right after it, which means this happened right then. They stopped.

Probably Oliver said, “Is that right?” or something. And “How do you spell that?”

So Joseph must have spelled it out,

and he must have spelled it out letter for letter.

Because if you spell that just slowly,

as syllable by syllable— Co-Ri-An-Ta-Mur—

nobody’s going to spell it as MR, the way it’s supposed to be.

Right. So when he writes this, Oliver writes it in line, right after, he spells it correctly: T-U-M-R. And his R is wonderful because it goes like this.

And he never wrote an R like that anywhere else in the Book of Mormon manuscripts.

This R at the end is sort of like how could you expect me to know how to spell this? His frustration with a spelling which is really weird. Right.

But notice, Joseph Smith couldn't have actually given this spelling to him unless he had actually seen MR.

He has to see MR to spell it out MR.

It’s not a customary usage. You you just don’t spell it like that. No, no, it’s impossible

for English to get MR.

So, this is this is one of the really interesting ones. Joseph Smith must have seen,

either directly in the instrument or in his mind through the instrument, the actual spelling, so he could spell it out letter for letter. One time, Oliver or Joseph said, “My son C.”

It’s Alma speaking to, I believe, Corianton, and he says, “My son C.” And for some reason Oliver wrote down “My sons C.” He put it as a plural. Right? Well, it's wrong, you know, because there's only one son that Alma's talking to.

It's very hard to hear that.

And Oliver could have said back to him, “My sons C” with the plural. And Joseph would have thought, “Well, it's singular because I can’t hear. He didn’t even think, I’m hearing a plural.

Right. So there are, that’s what we mean by the kind of mishearing sound.

This one, usually if a name was given to Joseph Smith that was a biblical name, Joseph Smith never spelled them out.

So, when they’re in the Isaiah portion, you have all these biblical names being spelled,

they never spelled them out correctly. They’re misspelled. OK. And they’re not correct. But they knew that it was from Isaiah and they knew when the printer got ahold of them, they’d spell them correctly, so they didn’t worry about biblical names.

OK. But when they were doing Book of Mormon names, they knew they had to get at least the first one correct.

And so this is the first occurrence of “Coriantumr”

for Oliver Cowdery.

And there is a Coriantumr in the small plates, but the small plates were done later, so he would have already known how to spell it.

So this is his first occurrence

and he would very often just do it phonetically first and then he'd have to correct it.

There were people that observed the writing down of

the dictation. They said that Joseph Smith would dictate for long periods of time.

He would, of course, have to do a certain number of words at a time. He couldn’t just keep going on, he has stop.

And some of the witnesses say that the scribe, after writing a certain portion,

would then read back what he had written down and Joseph would then check

and they would make sure—try to make sure—that they had gotten it down as accurately as possible.

Some people believe that, Joseph, or that no mistakes could occur.

Many of the people witnessing it thought no mistakes could occur because they were checking this, and so forth. But there definitely are mistakes, more than just simple

kinds of spelling errors. There are mistakes in the original manuscript.

There's one place that talks about Ishmael and also his whole whole. That’s the way . . .

His what? “His whole whole.” That’s the way the actual original manuscript reads. And it can’t be right.

I mean, and Oliver believed that it was Ishmael and also his household. Right.

And there's actually evidence to suggest that what it really was was Ishmael and also his whole household. OK. And that’s where you get the “whole whole” repeated. Right. But that’s a conjecture. But so is Oliver’s.

When he wrote the printer’s copy to make the printers, he decided that “whole whole” was “household.” So there are mistakes in the actual original manuscript.

It was Brigham Young who once said that “No work ever performed by men is perfect.” There were some mistakes made on the manuscript of the Book of Mormon,

but that makes the entire work all that more remarkable.

A lot of people think that when Joseph Smith lost the 116 pages of the Book of Mormon,

that when the replacement came to use this record that Nephi prepared it from the small plates, that they did that first. But the evidence seems to indicate that they waited to the end. And so they were up at the Whitmer home near the end in June of 1829. And they had finished

the Book of Moroni and then they started on First Nephi.

Joseph translated the end of the Book of Mormon first— that portion from the large plates that covered from Mosiah up through to Moroni. Then he started translating from the small plates, first Nephi up to Mosiah. Now think about it.

If Joseph had been making up the story,

how could he have created a coherent story doing it that way?

But, you know, these people that go around saying this is a 19th century novel,

written by Joseph Smith, you know. They pretty well come down to its Joseph Smith now, but, you know, there's real problems with that hypothesis. And so that's one of the things that we continue to investigate.

This text is a very surprising text, much more controlled.

A lot of people have seen the the incorrect grammar

of the text that Joseph Smith dictated and say, “Well, this just shows this is Joseph Smith.” But actually all those grammatical changes we can find in English, much more prominent in

even standard forms of English back in middle English and early modern English. So even these kinds of things like “that they was” in the 1830 edition may not be due to dialect overlay from Joseph Smith. It may be. There is that possibility, but it's something that we're really looking into in some depth.

The language of the Book of Mormon then, was it revealed text or was it fashioned in the mind of Joseph Smith?

More and more, the evidence mounts that the Book of Mormon is a revelation from God.

No man in Joseph Smith’s circumstances could have

made it up.

One of the really surprising findings,

and I’m not trying to figure it out,

but one of the really surprising findings of the last two years is that the vocabulary of the original text of the Book of Mormon appears not to come from the 1800s, but from the 15 and 1600s.

There are word uses in there which date to the same time as the King James Bible, but are not found in the King James Bible.

For instance, there’s one in the original text where it reads, “but if” and it means “unless.”

And the 1920 edition, in fact, replaced, “but if” with “unless” because they could tell, that’s what it meant.

It turns out that “but if” meant “unless” until about the 1600s.

Another example in there is “Moses departed the Red Sea.”

And the 1830 typesetter, just, you know, he just thought it was an error and he changes “departed” to “parted the Red Sea.”

But it turns out in Bibles and so forth prior to the King James Bible, “departed” was the common word for like, “they departed my raiment.”

Instead of “they parted my raiment,” and so this is really a very surprising result.

I have not found any word in the Book of Mormon which is later than, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, coming into English later than 1720, according to their records.

It is an archaic, biblical sounding text, but it’s not just a King James text.

Many of these kinds of vocabulary things have been removed from the text because they're so non-standard.

And this is a very surprising result. And a lot of people have been badgering me about what it means.

And I finally decided, look, I don't know what it means, but the evidence is there that this is what it is.

It’s an early modern English text.

It isn’t, as far as we can tell, it isn’t upstate New York vocabulary that’s being used.

And that's that's a very sobering thought.

We don't know what Joe Smith actually had to go through to get this text, but there really isn't evidence for him getting ideas and sitting there trying to formulate it and put it into words. If that were the case,

why would you keep saying the rod of iron instead of an iron rod like we sing today? Or the plates of brass every time, not the brass plates, even though in church we always say the brass plates.

If this were just being given in ideas, we should expect those kinds of things and we don't get it.

I realized very early that we would not be able to recover the original text. The original text I view as the English language text that was, I believe, revealed to Joseph Smith that he actually saw it in the interpreters. The evidence is pretty strong, I think, that he saw actual words, and he saw them spelled out,

including the names. And one of the big discoveries, I think, of this project is that because we only have 28 percent of the original, we're probably not going to be able to recover the whole text.

We’re not. You know, there’s, there’s just . . .

The only way the text can actually be fully recovered is to have it re-revealed.

And speaking of revealed text, there's a lot of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon

and it's different. And with regards to translation, it's a better translation. And that’s not all. Book of Mormon Isaiah—

there’s more than just that.

People say, OK, the base text for the Isaiah portions and the biblical portions are coming from the King James Bible.

Therefore, Joseph Smith must have opened up his King James Bible

and read off and made changes as he went.

The problem with this is none of the witnesses said he ever had books, manuscripts, or anything.

As far as we know, Joseph Smith didn’t have access to a Bible. The printer did. We can see that.

Next week on The Joseph Smith Papers,

the printing of the Book of Mormon

and why it appears that no two existing copies of the original Book of Mormon are the same.

Thank you for joining us. See you next week.