He used "And it came to pass" over 1500 times in the first printed BOM. Today that would be considered a speech/language disorder.

Most of the "And it came to pass" were removed sometime after the first printing.

The name of this disorder is "Palilalia". (which kind of sounds like Pay Lay Ale) This kind of language disorder is seen in Alzheimers/Autism and diseases or injuries involving the frontal cortex.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/medical/palilalia

Why did Joseph use this phrase so many times?

"...and it came to pass..." over 1,500 times?


I think he was horny.

JS simply engaged in the 19th century equivalent of writing a high school essay in larger font and with double spacing in order to meet the minimum page requirement.

But even the older bibles from the 1700's and earlier didn't make this kind of screwy language mistake. Joseph read many books that Hyrum brought home from Dartmouth.

He clearly had a disorder of some kind. Normal people don’t do what Joseph did. He was a narcissist and a sociopath or psychopath.

Aren't you being too hard on psychos? Those are the traits needed to establish a religion.

What about Joel Osteen et al?

A person with autism would likely not have the social skills to do what Joseph and his cohort did. I agree with Lottie -- whoever wrote the BoM was simply a poor writer trying to fill up space with something that sounded vaguely Biblical.

That's my opinion too. It's the written equivalent of a speaker peppering their sentences with "and uh" and "like". He probably thought it sounded ponderous and important, and that was what he was going for.

Plus he was trying to jack up the word count, which is also why he quoted so much of Isaiah (KJV) verbatim. Padding the text.

The explanation is simpler. It appears a lot in translations of the Hebrew Bible.

In the First Edition, the (I believe 8) witnesses wrote that Joe was the "author" of the BoM, which was altered for the second and subsequent editions to read "translator".

I didn't know so many "it came to pass" phrases were removed/edited out!!

My mother, who had Alzheimer's disease, exhibited palilalia during her last days, repeating random syllables while looking very frightened. It was extremely unsettling, but nothing like Joe Jr's repetitiousness, which he seems to have used as a sort of "springboard phrase" to get up enough imaginative steam to lie a bit more.

....and the writer of his translation didn't catch him and say, "Joseph you are using that phrase way too much".It seems like Emma or Oliver would have corrected him. I find it weird that it was sent to press that way.

I think they were modestly-educated hicks (not UNeducated) whose main source of culture was the bible. They only corrected it because people criticized it and laughed at them. Also, don't forget, it was 'holy scripture' and 'the word of ghawd' and therefore unamendable - until they amended it, setting up a trend which would become a habit ;-)

So early Mormonism was unamenably unamendable--or would that be unamenably amendable? Or, given the changes, amenably amendable?

I get so confused. . .

"They mended the unamendable...they were ghawds!"

Put very amenably!

I was quite pleased with 'unamendable' and the spell check let it through, so I will not amend it ;-)

Well, if I inadvertently cast aspersions on the innocent, I will happily make amends.

I say “sh!t” more times a day than JS ever said, It shall come to pass.”

Hmmm, maybe I have that disorder.

Yes. Reformed Egyptian.

What's the difference between inflammable and flammable?

If one is disgruntled, must they have been gruntled beforehand?


Please don't ask me about irregardless _ regardless!

To paraphrase mark Twain, if there weren't so many occurances of "and it came to pass" then it would have only been a Pamphlet of Mormon.

There's a simpler explanation. He wanted to give his book a scriptural tone. He mimicked the KJV sound. He wasn't a great writer, so he kept falling back on certain phrases. This was one.

Mark Twain put it:

"The book seems to be merely a prosy detail of imaginary history, with the Old Testament for a model; followed by a tedious plagiarism of the New Testament. The author labored to give his words and phrases the quaint, old-fashioned sound and structure of our King James's translation of the Scriptures; and the result is a mongrel--half modern glibness, and half ancient simplicity and gravity. The latter is awkward and constrained; the former natural, but grotesque by the contrast. Whenever he found his speech growing too modern--which was about every sentence or two--he ladled in a few such Scriptural phrases as "exceeding sore," "and it came to pass," etc., and made things satisfactory again. "And it came to pass" was his pet. If he had left that out, his Bible would have been only a pamphlet."