A multidisciplinary team employed an AI-based statistical model to analyze the first nine books of the Hebrew Bible, known as the Enneateuch. By examining subtle variations in word usage and sentence patterns, they identified three distinct scribal traditions. The model not only attributed authorship to various chapters but also provided explanations for its conclusions, highlighting specific linguistic features that influenced its decisions. This approach offers a quantitative method for exploring the composition and authorship of ancient texts.

https://phys.org/news/2025-06-ai-reveals-hidden-language-patterns.amp

I’ve never worried or cared much about who wrote the BoM. It is clearly 19th century Biblical fan fiction. That’s enough to rip the foundation out from under Mormonism. What person or persons wrote the fiction may be of interest, but the fact that it is fiction is the key point.

One or many. How much plagiarism?

And that matters because why? It’s a fraud because it is fiction. If it is plagiarized fiction, that’s just a bit of fraud icing on the fraud cake.

Because I've read a lot of what Joseph Smith produced and I'm curious.

Go ahead & try it and you will discover the first instance of AI going to sleep.

OrigamiDude Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Go ahead & try it and you will discover the first
> instance of AI going to sleep.

That was a good laugh. Thank you! :)

It still made me laugh again, days later.

AI is just going to dumb people down even more. People are already treating Grok like a know it all resource.

If the book of Ether is looked as a standalone piece of religious literature, it has to be the most absurd religious book ever written outside of Scientology. I wonder how AI would analyze it?

Being sick and putzing around I found this on Xenu from Wikipedia

Xenu, also called Xemu, is a figure in the Church of Scientology's secret "Advanced Technology", a sacred and esoteric teaching. According to the "Technology", Xenu was the extraterrestrial ruler of a "Galactic Confederacy" who brought billions of his people to Earth in a DC-8-like spacecraft 75 million years ago, stacked them around volcanoes, and killed them with hydrogen bombs. Official Scientology scriptures hold that the thetans of these aliens adhere to humans, causing spiritual harm.

Book of Ether had wooden submarines at sea for 300 days with livestock and bees. It is hard to say which outrageous story is more believable. How are humans minds conditioned to believe this nonsense? I still shake my head that I was so naive.

What throws me is how I have a psychopath mother who is incapable of love. I had a checked out father. These people were able to indoctrinate successfully for their entire lives 8 out of 10 children.

I get mixing doctrine and facts and fable and myth. I think Hindus have some strange stuff but there seems to be no upper bound.

We propagate the impossible. But without an environment to bolster the unbelievable I wonder why people cling to this stuff? It must give them comfort that a disembodied finger created stone light bulbs.

"Book of Ether had wooden submarines at sea for 300 days with livestock and bees"

There was a hole in the top and a hole in the bottom. Plugged with wooden plugs, I suppose, and big enough for everyone to fit through. Jaredite engineering comes through yet again.

But hey, nobody died cuz God. The whole thing was a miracle. With God, even the most far-fetched absurdities are possible. So yes, TBMs really do believe the story.

If you never had the misfortune to have read the Book of Mormon, here are a few good reasons why you shouldn’t bother: First of all, it's dry as dirt.

Second, it's filled with nasty stories that little boys love, like chopping off heads and slashing off arms. Most of the details are cartoonishly implausible, like lopping off someone's head and then wearing their clothes around and pretending to be the dead guy to his own servants.

Finally, you’ll see that the doctrines in there are neither that deep nor original. Mormons don't even follow them, like Jacob's condemnation of polygamy. About the only original doctrine I can think of is 8 year old baptism, and I think that is way too young.

BTW, there are no love stories in the BofM. The Bible has several love stories, like Samson & Delilah, David & Bathsheba, Solomon & the Queen of Sheba, Joseph & Mary, Queen Esther. There are also several tales of brotherly love, like Ruth & Naomi or David & Jonathan. The relationships in the BofM are very 2-dimensional, and women are barely mentioned. The only woman I can name is Sariah, Lehi's wife. Nephi doesn't even bother to mention his wife, nor do any of the other "authors" down to Moroni.

It's almost as if it were written/compiled by one young man with no life experience....



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/08/2025 03:09PM by vzgardner.

There are 3 Biblical women mentioned in the BoM (Eve, Sarah and Mary), and 3 BoM female characters mentioned by name:
Sariah, wife of Lehi,
Abish, Lamanite servant of King Lamoni,
Isabel, a harlot.

And that’s it. The Bible mentions more than 200 women. The Bible is an actual narrative written by real people with real lives (well, after the first 5 books, anyway, and there were even women in those first five). The BoM is fiction written by a young man (men?)

That's five more women than are named in the Quran. Maryam (Mary) is the only woman named in the Quran despite numerous women appearing in its stories.

Sure Thing Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> That's five more women than are named in the
> Quran. Maryam (Mary) is the only woman named in
> the Quran despite numerous women appearing in its
> stories.


The koran is the opp of bom. Muslims try to say only one person wrote the koran but mormons say the bom was written by multiple people. The koran has evidence of multiple authors.

vzgardner Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> About the only original doctrine I can
> think of is 8 year old baptism. . .

Even that was purloined.

Much of the protestant world thought that infant baptism and the notion that a stillborn child would be damned were abominable ideas. Since the preconditions for baptism were faith and repentance, meaning a certain degree of mental and emotional development as well as personal commitment, there was no way a small child could reasonably be subjected to the ordinance.

So what age was appropriate? There were various ideas floating about in the 19th century, but a prominent one was eight. Not only did that seem right in terms of a child's maturity, it also had some symbolic meaning inasmuch as the creation story had God in charge for the first seven days and then turned the world over to humans, who were entrusted with their own salvation through faith, baptism, and repentance.

So the Mormon "age of accountability" wasn't Mormon after all.

If the claims of the Book of Mormon were true, we would have every Mesoamerican researcher publishing papers saying, "You know, it looks like we have a colony of Christ believing Hebrews here." And, over the years, that belief would get more and more evidence, not less. There would be evidences of massive battles and wars of extinction around 400AD, metal plates with odd, Egyptian-like writing turning up in digs all over Mesoamerica, and vestiges of Biblical beliefs in Adam and Eve, Noah's ark, the tower of babel, and the atonement turning up in Central American murals and stelae. And, the date of 33AD would be very, very notable for the huge change in population, and a consolidation of beliefs to pure, New Testament Christianity for hundreds of years over the entire proposed Book of Mormon geography. FARMS would have published article after article about how there really were horses and chariots and steel swords back then, instead of explaining why not.

They aren't true. I'm an AI hobbiest and my curiosity is how The Smiths produced the BoM.

They would have used AI today probably.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 06/12/2025 11:27AM by Elder Berry.

Textual analysis has been done for a long, long time. Including quantitative methods. AI is not magic. Some pretty impressive human intelligence has been used here.

It's seldom applied to BoM probably because most scholars realize there's no "there there".

But sometimes has been applied e.g.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/hiding-in-plain-sight-the-origins-of-the-book-of-mormon/

That article seemed to stretch things with regards to dreams and martyrs but I see the parallel. I don't know if Smith was ever recorded being influenced by that take. I do think textual analysis by a machine might be just as interesting.