There is a short interview at the link below with Kendal Sheets: author of Book of Mormon, Book of Lies. He seems to have tracked down some sources of the BoM text. I have no idea how compelling the case being made in the book is.

Personally I am convinced it was a team effort - Sidney Rigdon, Oliver Cowdery and Smith. Smith was using documents supplied to him by Cowdery / Rigdon as well as his vivid imagination. The text may well have been a double plagiarism, e.g. input from Solomon Spalding's manuscript that may have already "borrowed" heavily from other authors.

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

I am really looking forward to reading this book.

At first glance the claims made by Sheets seem consistent with the account we are developing at MormonLeaks.com -- that the book is a layered collaboration involving a Spalding core narrative (much of which Spalding himself plagiarized - "double plagiarism" as you call it), Rigdon's theological inputs (drawing heavily from the King James Bible), and with subsequent additions by Smith, Cowdery, and Pratt...especially after the lost pages incident, when financial desperation became the major driver.

Evidence for this account will be released soon in MormonLeaks Episode 5.

New Episode is posted: http://mormonleaks.com/library/episode-05/

Thanks for the video link.

This book looks really interesting.

Hi Arend,
I just came across your post; I am the author that was interviewed by David Pakman. If you want some background on the book and my research, you can visit my website at www.bookofmormonbookoflies.com. There is a tab called "The Evidence" where I summarize some highlights of our book. Also, I've uploaded copies of the actual books that I used in this research and showed on the video for anyone to download and follow along my book or do the research for themselves. My goal is to be as open as I can and get others involved in their own research about this discovery. In a nutshell, the Smiths plagiarized from published travels and history books, primarily the Travels of Marco Polo. I've also decyphered Lucy Smith's book where she gives a hidden confession of who, how, and why they did it. I enjoy reading others' research on this topic and am happy to discuss it.
-Ken

That's a great website! I see you went to OU. Boomer Sooner!

Hah! Yes, I am from Okla and went to OU engineering school. Go Sooners! We Okies are everywhere!

that, in a nutshell, is the problem.

I read the book in a busy week and found it impossible to put down. Some things just didn't get done. The "revelations" in it are startling, the research exhaustive, the care and attention impressive and the arguments compelling. A real page-turner and as close to "conclusive" as I have ever seen anyone come.

Hi Ken, Many thanks for the reply - your book and website are fascinating.

" Book of Mormon book of lies" co authored by Meredith & Kendal Sheets . published Nov 2012. outlines the source of the book of mormon plagiarised primarily from "The Travels of Marco Polo" published in English by William Marsden. 1818. Joseph Smith Sr started the works and father and son completed it together.

Of all the theories ( Sheets ) points to Smith senior as the instigator of the work of plagiarism.. story line, names and dates lifted from The Travels of Marco Polo 1818 english edition.


I downloaded a copy of Bof M book of Lies from itunes books to my iPhone.

Ordered the BoMBoL and Marco Polo from amazon. Hopefully they'll get here in time for the xmas break.

Looking forward to reading them.

OK, I need to remember not to mix up Kendal Sheets with Kerry Shirts, so if you guys do a video series on this Marco Polo theory, please don't tape it outside your old jeep with introductory comments about the majestic mountain scenery in the background.

:-) :-) :-) :-) :-)

he makes me laugh.

It does look very interesting and shows even more possibilities Joseph had to borrow stuff from other sources available at his time.

I had never heard of any parallels with Marco Polo's travels and the BofM before. Thanks for doing this Kendal

I have done an independent evaluation before reading the book, and , indeed there are parallels. There are few stories in MP, yet many or most are paralleled in BoM.

Hi everyboy,

It is ok if you do not agree with the Mormon doctrine, but cannot you see this guy Kendal Sheets is trying to make money out of a scandal? I am not giving my money to someone who claims to have all the answers about mormonism... If he wants to do a good action, why giving his book for free? Because he saw his opportunity and took it thanks to all the fools who want to pay for it!

My initial reaction was cautiously optimistic. I bought it. Now I think it was a waste of money.


Here are problems I have with this book:

1. The parallels that the authors claim to have found with the Book of Mormon could easily be coincidental, and, unfortunately, it is difficult to cross-check their claimed parallels without reading the claimed source documents in their entirety.

For example, they report alignments in the storyline of Marco Polo with the storyline of the Book of Mormon, but they simply show phrases and excerpts where a match can be imagined. What they don't show is where the text does not match. In other words, the frequency of "claimed matches" needs to be compared to the frequency of "non-matches". I strongly suspect that many of these claimed are coincidental. This kind of cherry-picking could be used to find pseudo-parallels with Genesis or many other long fictional narratives.

The parallels identified by the authors are nowhere near as strong as the word-for-word parallels identified by Tom Donofrio.

2. The authors' theory rests largely on Lucy Smith's account and their speculations about it. What is it about Lucy Smith that makes her so reliable? I don't consider her a reliable witness at all, and I especially don't see why her word trumps the accounts of dozens of other people.

3. The authors have little or no sense of the history of the Book of Mormon fabrication or its overarching structure (much of which resulted from the lost pages incident).

4. The authors make no attempt to integrate their work and claims with existing data. They don't mention the vast amount of historical and textual data implicating Rigdon and Cowdery in the creation of the Book of Mormon.

I would have liked to incorporate something from this book in the account at MormonLeaks.com, but, so far, I can't found anything of value. I can't recommend buying it.

And at the same time I'll offer a welcome to Kendal above, along with a caveat that here at RFM are literally the sharpest folks I've encountered on these subjects, bar none.

Okay, Dave T. will get mad at me if I don't mention MormonThink, and that site is another...

And most of us have a lot of that old "Mormon Perfectionism" as a hangover. If we hadn't had those abilities, we'd probably be in the church and smothering our doubts however people do it these days. Even as a technical Nevermo (I was the ward project as a teen) I still had to separate the science from the shinola, and the LDS culture is well practiced in obfuscation.

I'm not personally that interested in the minutiae of the BOM's origins (it's a fraud. period), but many do need to see it deconstructed thoroughly, and that's a necessity because their efforts will be subjected to withering attacks from the apologetics crowd.

Don't expect much honesty from those sorts, incidentally. I am still passionate about how the authentic history of the Saints in Utah was suppressed (and still trying to grasp the interplay of the personalities involved) as well as the DNA research debunking the notion of Nephites and Lamanites in the New World. And the attacks and scorn we've been subjected to are often withering and mind numbing.

As I said, Kendal, I wish you well, and I have no quarrel with someone making money off a book; shoot, I've peddled a fair number for Will Bagley, and I hope some one will do the same for me if I get it written as planned...

I would, however, listen very carefully to the criticisms offered here because they are doubtless well-founded. And you'll want to cross-examine yourself ruthlessly on your "agendas"; no less than Richard Abanes had a particularly difficult time here because of his evangelical underpinnings, and Dan Vogel was also thrashed over his "pious fraud" views of what motivated Joseph Smith. And both men are accepted as competent and generally honest historians.

Regardless of the authorship of the BOM (and I think Craig has it pegged correctly; it's clear he's given it years of thought and research), the complexity of the narcissistic "charisma" of Joseph Smith also bedevils our understandings. I have noted that sane people do not react well to insanity (and there was an obviously delusional element to his character), and authentically good people of integrity have a tough time understanding the motives of charlatans and con men.

So a man giving a book of true facts, data, and information should not be compensated for all the years and money he spent researching and writing it ? The Mormon Prophet gets paid.

I am a healthcare provider. Should I simply work for free? I spent 8 years and a million $$ to get educated and set up to help. Am I bad since I charge for my time and services?

I think anyone that spent a lot of time creating a book, which is a LOT of work, should be able to charge a fee. How much time was spent researching? At what cost to create the book? There are many books out there that are specious factually, yet charge a fee.

If nobody cares, nobody will buy it...

I am excited to order this book, having read a few pages that are displayed for free on the Amazon website. Now I want to read three books:

"The Book of Mormon" (or in my case re-reading with a new understanding.)

"Book of Mormon, Book of Lies"

and "The Travels of Marco Polo".

Wow, if all this information lines up, it will be another broadside to the "U.S.S. LDS" the Titanic of religious beliefs.

(As for place names in the BoM, I thought they were derivatives of the old names for the towns of New York, with the exception of "Moroni" and "Camorah" from the time of Captain Kidd in the Indies.)

Good discussion. Of course, Elder B. H. Roberts figured most all of this out nearly 100 years ago. After reading, "Studies of the Book of Mormon," I can't imagine he was *really* a believer anymore. Yet the "S.S. LDS" keeps sailing.

It just dawned on me (DUH!)that if Oliver Cowdery had a copy of the book of Mormon already, having been part of "team effort," HE, and not JS, would have had to hide the BOM script from eyewitneses' accounts. Joseph Smith's words would be conveniently muffled by his hat, or he could have memorized a few lines for when the various eyewitnesses were present. (DUH! again.)



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 08/21/2013 03:57PM by PapaKen.

I bought it on Amazon Kindle and while I won't be asking for my money back, I also don't consider it well-spent.

The premise that similar ideas appear similar percentages of the way through both MP and the BoM is a stretch, and as the book progressed the authors got looser and looser with how close the passages had to be percentage-wise, and those that did match only did so with loose definitions of "matched" and were often very generic passages to begin with.

For example, one supposed match where at 3.17% into MP it says "Wherever *his tents were pitched*, a boarded platform was set up.." and in the BoM at 1.36% it says "*he pitched his tent* in a valley beside a river of water" (emphasis theirs). People in the day traveled in tents, tents get pitched, this is not damning evidence, especially when the passages are passive voice in one and active voice in the other.

I do believe that the author(s) of the BoM were well-read, and I won't discount that one thing they read was MP, but I am unconvinced by BoM:BoL.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think the authors are trying to cash in, I'm willing to believe they wrote the book with real intent, I'm just unconvinced by it.

To clarify, if someone told me that the authors of the BoM had read MP and used concepts from it to add some realism to the journey from Jerusalem, showed some common themes and left it at that, I'd say it was plausible. The percentage matching throughout makes it seem more like a claim that JS read MP and built the BoM from it as he went along, which I can't get behind.

Even a cursory examination reveals it's very obvious J.S. use the KJV Bible and "View of the Hebrews" (by Ethan Smith) as source materials for the BOM....

I reviewed this book for the Association of Mormon Letters:

http://forums.mormonletters.org/yaf_postsm2582_Sheets-and-Sheets-Book-of-Mormon-\
Book-of-Lies-reviewed-by-Richard-Packham.aspx#2582

Good review, I agree with your conclusions.

http://forums.mormonletters.org/yaf_postst1439_Sheets-and-Sheets-Book-of-Mormon-Book-of-Lies-reviewed-by-Richard-Packham.aspx

And a free cab ride to top...