One of the biggest and easiest ways of knowing that Joseph Smith was a liar is to read the first edition of the Book of Mormon.

It's filled with grammatical tells that the book was written by a barely educated 19th century farmer. There are hundreds of these errors, the most egregious of which are the repeated insertion of "a" in phrases it doesn't belong. It's exactly the sort of mistake that someone like him would make.

"As I was a journeying to see a very near kindred ..." (page 249) [Alma 10:7]

"And as I was a going thither ..." (page 249) [Alma 10:8]

"... the foundation of the destruction of this people is a beginning to be laid ..." (page 251) [Alma 10:27]

"... he met with the sons of Mosiah, a journeying towards the land ..." (page 269) [Alma 17:1]

"... as Ammon and Lamoni was a journeying thither ..." (page 280) [Alma 20:8]

"... there he found Muloki a preaching the word ..." (page 284) [Alma 21:11]

"... went about from house to house, a begging for his food." (page 309) [Alma 30:56]

"And Korihor did go about from house to house, a begging food ..." (page 309) [Alma 30:58]

"... Moroni, on the other hand, had been a preparing the minds ..." (page 358) [Alma 48:7]

Mormons sometimes will say that the language of the book is so great that it's proof it's real. The true history of the text says the literal opposite.

There are many more grammatical mistakes. It's far simpler to believe that these errors were made by a poorly educated backwoods money digger than to believe that a magic rock lit up and showed these grammatical atrocities to be copied down verbatim.

A massive list of them here:

http://www.utlm.org/onlinebooks/3913intro.htm

Very good example of grammatical errors. Your tangible example brings to life what the statement "grammatical errors" means. Thank you.

A journeying etc isn't bad grammar, it's just slightly country.

It's likely that ghawd is both a little bit country and a little bit rock 'n roll, right?

That's hilarious. Someone give this man a tip!

Just following up on this subject, it's interesting to note that present-day Mormon apologists have tried to argue that the grammatical mistakes were actually the product of Joseph Smith and his peepstone using authentic early English.

There is a new tradition of this started recently Royal Skousen, a brief summary of which is here:

https://humanities.byu.edu/bad-grammar-and-the-book-of-mormon/

But this has two significant problems:

1) Many of the corrections were made by Smith himself. If the errors were the product of a "tight" or near-literal translation, why did the original "author and proprietor" of the book alter it so much? Surely he would have been a better arbiter of what God wanted the English translation to say that some worldly BYU professors living almost 200 years after the first edition was released.

2) The church never rendered the backwoods grammar in its translations of the BOM into other languages. The leaders easily could have done so but chose not to. Many of these translations were paid for or even produced by people who knew Smith personally.

3) BH Roberts, the former church historian already considered this excuse and concluded that to believe God would have deliberately have produced ersatz Elizabethan English through the stone-in-hat method without letting readers know why would be an insult to God's divine intelligence.

But like a dog returning to its vomit, Mormon apologists are trying to regurgitate obviously rancid rationalizations.

"Are these flagrant errors in grammar chargeable to the Lord? To say so is to invite ridicule. The thoughts, the doctrines, are well enough; but the awkward, ungrammatical expression of the thoughts is, doubtless, the result of the translator's imperfect knowledge of the English language ... that old theory cannot be successfully maintained; that is, the Urim and Thummim did the translating, the Prophet, nothing beyond repeating what he saw reflected in that instrument; that God directly or indirectly is responsible for the verbal and grammatical errors of translation. To advance such a theory before intelligent and educated people is to unnecessarily invite ridicule, and make of those who advocate it candidates for contempt ...

"It is no use resisting the matter, the old theory must be abandoned. It could only come into existence and remain so long and now be clung to by some so tenaciously because our fathers and our people in the past and now were and are uncritical." (Defense of the Faith, by B. H. Roberts, Deseret News, 1907-1912, pages 278, 279, 295, 306, 307 and 308)

That guy needs to get his facts straight. The Urim and Thummim were not used to translate the BoM. They, the breastplate, and the plates were taken by the angel after Martin Harris lost the 116 pages. When the plates were returned, the breastplate and UT were not. Joseph used his peep stone.

How awful is that? Lol, one of the worst apologetics I have heard from church leaders about the seer stone is that the information and history was always there and the church did not deliberately practice a deception. Yet here we have an LDS historian who gets the story wrong. If that doesn't illustrate the deliberate obfuscation of history by the church authority, then I don't know what does.

WOW !!!

for the sake of promoting His restored church, MORmON Jesus would have been so much better off to leave the Golden Tablets on earth for wide spread public viewing and inspection as an indication that Joseph Smith was divinely guided to find them, instead of taking the plates up to heaven for storage where no one could ever see them.

MORmON Jesus should have taken Joseph Smith's translated text of the Golden Plates so that text would never be seen again instead of taking the Golden Plates.

+smirkorama:
"WOW !!!

for the sake of promoting His restored church, MORmON Jesus would have been so much better off to leave the Golden Tablets on earth for wide spread public viewing and inspection as an indication that Joseph Smith was divinely guided to find them, instead of taking the plates up to heaven for storage where no one could ever see them.

MORmON Jesus should have taken Joseph Smith's translated text of the Golden Plates so that text would never be seen again instead of taking the Golden Plates."

==I have better idea. Mormon Jesus should buy a Xerox and copy the pages.

Or...

Is it difficult to make a photocopy of every page for a god? Was this option considered?
Is it difficult to take pictures of every page for a god? Was this option considered?
Is it difficult to make a bunch of exact duplicates that are identical at the atomic level for a god?
Is it difficult to make it indestructible for a god?
I don’t know. Make it out of Tungsten Carbide or Scandium Carbide or some magical god atoms.
Wouldn’t it make more sense to submit a copy or a few copies or a thousand copies to all experts on the planet?

~~~~iceman9090

the WITNESS STATEMENT of the 8 found in the book ... they state that JS was the AUTHOR of the BoM; later editions claim / state that he was the translator.


See how easily & seldom noticed they change things to appear more palatable?

Really? That is hella damning.

when I noticed that, I wrote to ChurchCo & asked them

when was that change made?

did ALL the 8 assent to the change?


answer: We Don't Know

The title page of the 1830 first edition of the BOM also calls Smith the author. Here is a photograph of the page from an LDS-owned website:

https://www.josephsmithpapers.org/paper-summary/book-of-mormon-1830/7

My father's flimsy excuse for the "Joseph Smith, author" notation was that the printer made Smith do it. But the book was vanity press, which means anything goes. The printer doesn't care about content when he's pre-paid.

By the way, the Book of Mormon has always and only been vanity press. The church tried to get Simon and Schuster to pick up the book in order to legitimize it, but even that involved a pre-payment, and it fell through. Never has any non-Mormon accepted the book as non-fiction. Never.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2020 06:50PM by donbagley.

And of all the "stipend" paid testimonials that have been given over the years, I add mine...

I know that thy Revisionist Lives! For I saw him correcting both the right hand and the left hand of Joe Smith.

I read an apologist article a few months ago that defended the ersatz old-timey language in the BoM not as mistakes, but...wait it...more proof of its *authenticity*. Why? Because the 17th Century english used is not only KJV-era but certain grammar and word usage stretches back to the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries.

So, once again, glaringly obvious mistakes are lauded as "how could JS possibly have known" strokes of genius!

If I wrote a book like that it would have passages like: "And ot came to pass, yea, verily, that this dude called Nephi was rockin' the duds of the guy he hath recently slain upon the command of the Man Upstairs, ya know what I mean? I mean, he totally whacked him like a mob hit because the guy was super drunk after a-coming home from a hootenanny, at which soiree the gentleman was entreated to imbibe a shitload of wine and absinth, and God was all like--chop his head off with the miscreant's own scimitar."

Ten outta ten! Would def read!

Even more damning IMO is that Smith tried to sell the BOM's copyright in Canada. Not copies of the book – the actual copyright.

https://www.missedinsunday.com/memes/scripture/sell-the-copyright/

(other sources are on webpage)

I'd love for someone to do an audio book reading of the first edition.

Who should it be?

Sam Elliot?
Woody Harrelson?

No--how about Jacob Lofland from "The Son"?

Gilbert Gottfried.

I'd prefer it to be whoever portrays Cletus Spuckler on "The Simpsons." The words sound just like him.

Ah yes, the slack-jawed yokel. A great character!

Cletus: I know yer worried about yer parents seein' us kissin', but shucks, they's my parents too.

I Nephi, a-havin' bin borned a goodly parents...

Ya gotta love Cletus!

Drunk historians.

I hate to be a killjoy, but the prefix "a-" in front of a gerund is not a grammatical error. Words like "a-going" or "agoing" is using the "a- prefix," which is just a quaint/archaic use in English. It's seldom used anymore, but people of my parents' generation still used it a lot. The last person whom I recall using it habitually was my late mother-in-law, born on the Montana prairie in 1912. She was always saying, "And he was just a-going like a house afire!", or "She's at home a-fixing the dinner." My parents, born in the early 1900's in southern Indiana also used it a lot. So while quaint or archaic, it's not technically incorrect grammar. It is also still in use in more remote parts of the US and the UK.

Keep reading the first edition, though, and you'll stumble upon some real errors.

You are correct that the improper form of the present progressive that I mentioned in the OP was common among rural Americans in the earlier years of the country. It was also common among less-educated English people as evidenced by the title of the Christmas carol "Here We Come A Wassailing" which evokes the tradition of impoverished citizens asking for some holiday freebies in the form of a song.

This particular form of the present progressive was and is not any more proper than to say "I be going there."

It was not common in Elizabethan English, the form of English that the Book of Mormon crudely attempts to imitate. You will find zero pertinent results for this construction in the KJV if you search it online for such phrases as "I was a going."

That your deceased or elderly relatives who grew up in the country used this construction is actually supportive of my statement that Smith wrote the Book of Mormon in his backwoods-inflected English.

I agree that there are numerous other grammatical issues with the BOM. Additionally, the poor grammar of Smith and his scribes is especially problematic for the Doctrine and Covenants which was supposedly dictated directly by Jehovah or Elohim to his mortal servants.

As Richard Packham has documented extensively, one presumes that the all-knowing creator of the universe would know not to change pronouns and conjugations in the middle of clauses:

http://packham.n4m.org/linguist.htm#KINGJAMES

I liked one of the sentences in the original, where it said something like, "They was off a-praying." Now THAT's some countrified English. Still, the construction with the "a- prefix" is not indicative of bad grammar, just archaic. And not just in the States, but in much of the English-speaking world. Another archaic part of speech that Americans use is the quaint or archaic "gotten." Also, just for fun, you should listen to some Pakistani/Indian English, where they still use some ancient words, fallen out of favor probably more than 100 years ago. One such word is "dacoit," and "dacoity," used in about every newspaper covering a robbery.

I hope U read 'Who Really Wrote the BoM' by Cowdrey & Davis, I don't believe for a moment that Joe wrote it.

I wonder why Smith didn’t do rubbings of the plates, a la brass, stone and grave rubbings.

Well, I know why: because there were no plates, but they could have produced some fake ones. That would have been a lot of work though, and can you imagine the fun that could have been had with “Egyptian” characters invented completely by Smith?

...and even if there were plates, how would we know if they were a real artifact or one of those tricky "testing deceptions" placed there by a mischevious god, like dinosaur bones.

When Moroni read the first edition of the Book of Mormon he said I died for this crap? I mean the guy didn't even reference the notes I gave him. What a dumb shiz!

This unfortunately caused many early members to erroneously think that Joseph Smith descended from Shiz, the Jaredite leader that was beheaded. This is most likely is why in later years they tried to say that Joseph Smith was descended from people who fought the Revolutionary War.

Now mormonism is beginning to make more sense when you consider the Shiz factor.

I may get a copy, at least so I could know what all the early hopes and hoax was about.

Saw a reprint (of the 1830 edition) the other day at a lecture on mormonism. Guess I could swing for one some day.

Why do none of the snuffers and other mormon offshoots never translate the Book Of Shiz - I bet it would be a real cracker! I mean, the guy was even capable of breathing without his head (or his body, depending on your point of view.

"I, Shiz, being born of goodly parents..."

This is a feature of some dialects of English. The prefix a- precedes a participle in two contexts in these examples:

1. In continuous tenses where the participle is preceded by forms of "to be", "to become", etc.

2. As a complement after the noun phrase being modified.


I agree this is the language of a backwoods farmer in a specific part of the early 19th century United States, but I disagree with the notion that these are grammatical errors.


The greater farce is the faux-Jacobean English placed over this dialect substrate.

Tyson

It's older and broader than the country people among whom JS lived. It's purpose was to intensify the following word.

Consider:

"Here we come a-caroling among the leaves so green. . ."

"A-hunting we will go. . ."

"Six geese a-laying. . . seven swans a-swimming. . . eight maids a-milking."

This form goes back far before the American Revolution and is rooted in established English. It died out in the UK but remained in parts of the US and in Christmas carols and poetry.