first and second nephi and alma mostly.

I don't know exactly, but I do know they "could not sell the damn thing" in Canada.

notice that currently the Church gives them away.

"notice that currently the Church gives them away."


Actually, you _can_ buy them - I think I remember seeing them in Barnes & Noble.


But who in god's name would pay for it?

Holy smokes batman, could Anon possibly be the guy (TBM) that sat in my store the other day (we talked new phones) and we had a long 2 hour talk about me leaving and everything mormon? If it is, I hope you get some good answers here and study everything. For me, it was questioning just a couple of things that didn't pan out as they were explained to me 14 years ago. That led to: Well if that isn't how it really was, let's look at a few other things as well - and then the whole thing snowballed.

Excellent book with similar title;
"Who Really Wrote the Book of Mormon"

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Really-Wrote-Book-Mormon/dp/0758605277/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1299799744&sr=1-1

I think it's fascinating to think that Jo plagiarized the book.

However, before hearing of that, it was pretty plain to me that of course he *could* have written it. Doesn't take modern school learnin' to tell stories (in fact that might hinder it), and by his account he always had someone else writing it down and reading back to him what he had just said. It's not a super complex book; just a bunch of stories squished together.

In primary we used to sing:

"A record made by Nephi, a godly man of old.
Now in the book of mormon, the story is retold."


Maybe it should be:

"A manuscript plagiarized by conmen, thinking it could be sold.
Now on my shelf this scripture, does nothing but grow mold."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=utDU45lm210

Watch the entire series

This is an odd query considering the type of site this is!
Okay, so Joseph Smith created a great deal of the Book of Mormon by directly copying the Bible that was available to him at the time, without any understanding of the culture that produced the language used in it. Any historical linguist can verify this. The parts of the Bible that didn't quite suit him were changed a variety of times; he called these "translations". Oddly, there are historical copies of the Bible that date prior to the King James Version by hundreds of years, which do not show the "corrections" that Joseph Smith claims to. And I'd be willing to bet my entire bank account that no-one in the biblical era said "yea verily"!
But don't we all know this already???

I did

I confess, it was me

(well it's just as likely as the official explanation)