There is obviously a great deal of evidence that has been marshaled by Vanick and Criddle and their colleagues to support the Spalding-Rigdon theory of BOM authorship. Two problems I have with the theory is how to explain all the bad grammar and the absurd stories in the book which seem to point to Smith as the author. Does anyone have any ideas on how these two problems can be harmonized with the theory? Could it be that the bad grammar was intentional to divert attention from Rigdon and Cowdery and that is why Smith would not let the printer make any grammatical corrections?

Sidney Rigdon, an articulate, educated pastor and Oliver Cowdery, a professional schoolteacher.

The grammar and spelling in the Book of Mormon is so egregiously poor that the Mormon Church has acknowledged editing the BoM text through over 4,000 changes to correct the bad construction. (The LDS Church's post-Smith textual changes have, of course, gone far beyond simple spelling and grammatical fixes, but that sanitizing effort is a topic for another day).

Perhaps Smith, Rigdon and Cowdery were intent on getting the Book of Mormon to press as quickly as possible for monetary gain connected to their official church launch and were thus willing, in that rush, to leave in a lot of the errors (errors perhaps contained in either the Spalding manuscript itself or errors penned by the Book of Mormon inventors themselves). It's also possible that Smith and Company may have failed to spot these textual flaws, causing them to pass unnoticed.

Or maybe they didn't care, figuring the boo-boos would be caught and fixed by the printer, E.B. Grandin. That then could mean Grandin might not have done much of a spellcheck himself once he received the manuscript for typesetting.

Who knows? The whole thing was one sloppy, plagiarized mess.



Edited 11 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2013 11:34PM by steve benson.

At least some of the material (like Lehis's dream) was sourced from Joseph Smith's personal life, right? I tend to think of Smith and Rigdon and Cowdery as co-conspirators with Cowdery operating the pen. The content reflects Smith and Rigdon's input.

And I agree with your rush to press theory too, Steve. These were hungry men.

We have some examples to Spalding's narrative writings that
we can consult. Even though he was a college educated fellow,
and a Congregational evangelist with a master's degree, he
sometimes rattled off sentences which would get any one of
us an F on a paper in Engish class. Maybe that was just how
Spalding composed his fiction rough drafts, on the fly.
Maybe he fully intended to go back and clean up his English
before ever submitting anything for publication. But he
could turn out some pretty poor prose -- and that conclusion
doesn't even require our looking at his questionable efforts
to create a workable fictional plot-line.

Sidney Rigdon was less educated, but he won his rhetorical
spurs in the context of erudite Campbellism, and so had
some experience in expressing himself for an audience. He
was considered to be eloquent, in a frontier preacher sort
of way -- but could be crude, both in ideas and language.
His 1824 "Third Epistle of Peter" gives us an example of
how Rigdon went about composing pseudo-biblical text. It
is slightly more readable than the 1830 Book of Mormon.

Parley P. Pratt appears to have been the most accomplished
writer among the first Mormons. If people like himself or
W.W. Phelps had a say in composing the book, we might well
expect some better product than was issued forth in 1830.

Oliver Cowdery was a better writer than Joseph Smith, but
not by much. I see him as being on about the same low
level as Smith, but able to write in a legible hand, and
able to put his ideas into a readable order for some of
the early Mormon publications.

The Book of Mormon does not have a uniform orthography, in
terms of its style, when read aloud. The biblical passages
taken from the KJV stand out as the most literate, but
here and there, in other sections of the text, the wording
shines -- at least in the context of early 19th century
American fiction. Other parts -- whole chapters -- are
practically unreadable. It is a complex, mixed text.

I can only imagine Solmon Spalding having written his
probable contribution to the text as a thinly veiled
spoof -- a parody upon scripture and ancient storytelling
that might have not been immediately evident to people
of low intellect or no education.

But I cannot imagine Rigdon, or Pratt or Cowdery allowing
any obvious Spaldingish cynicism to remain in the text
that was being prepared for publication. Maybe they thought
that a "Lamanite" audience would be impressed by the
story of Ammon cutting off hundreds of attackers' arms,
or of Shiz's headless body struggling for breath. Maybe
they purposely left such stuff in the narrative -- maybe
they even inserted a few absurdities of their own.

Whatever the sources may have been, the final product
passed through the filter of Joe Smith's ignorant genius.
He gave the story its overall flavor, without fully editing
away the diversity I spoke of. The blame falls upon him, I
think, for what ended up between that book's covers.

UD

Great synopsis Uncle Dale! Thanks for taking the time.

If memory serves me, the printer, E.B. Grandin, claimed that Cowdery brought the manuscript with him every morning and took it home every night and refused to allow Grandin to make any grammatical corrections.

. . . leaving them to have to reconstruct their invention--or leaving them to come up with another "revelation" from God telling them not to restore what they were probably coming up with largely on the fly in the first place.



Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 03/13/2013 11:32PM by steve benson.

The word study done by Criddle et al attributed portions of the BOM to various authors, principally Rigdon, Spalding and to a lesser extent Cowdery and a little to Pratt. It would be interesting to know if there is any difference in the quality of the grammar and prose among the different attributed authors and to whom the various absurd stories are attributed, if the word study is that specific.

Tonto Schwartz Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> The word study done by Criddle et al attributed
> portions of the BOM to various authors,
> principally Rigdon, Spalding and to a lesser
> extent Cowdery and a little to Pratt. It would be
> interesting to know if there is any difference in
> the quality of the grammar and prose among the
> different attributed authors and to whom the
> various absurd stories are attributed, if the word
> study is that specific.

My theory is that Smith really did dictate large portions
of that text -- even when he and Cowdery were alone,
without observers monitoring their "translation" activity.

If that is what really happened, then NO lengthy part
of the BoM would be purely the product of a writer other
than Smith. He would have had continual opportunities to
put his literary mark upon any pre-written text segment.
Even if he had a photographic mind, and could recall
entire pre-written chapters verbatim, his was still the
last voice to impact upon the narrative before it was set
in concrete. Only in the biblical chapters would he have
been under considerable restraint, not to make many changes.

So -- if Matt Jockers measures a BoM chapter to have a
Rigdon origin percentage of 99% that still might leave
a 1% contribution from Smith, screwing up some grammar.
That is not exactly the way Jockers and Criddle assign
authorship, but you get my meaning, I'm sure.

UD

I think I agree Smith must have written a great deal even if he had text from Rigdon, Spalding and Cowdery. I don't know how else you can explain the bad grammar and absurd stories and other things the Tanners point out like the change from the use of "therefore" to "wherefore," the Prophesies concerning Joseph, Joseph Sr.'s dream making its way into the book and a few other things.

An explanation the switches from "wherefore" at the beginning of the Book of Mormon to "therefore" in the middle then back to "wherefore" at the end is described in Episode 5 at MormonLeaks.com.

Our authorship attribution studies using computer text analysis supports your conclusion that the "prophecy" in the BoM about Joseph the son of Joseph was likely written by Joseph Smith. This will be in the next episode at MormonLeaks.com.

As discussed in Episode 3 at MormonLeaks, it appears that the authors of the Book of Mormon attempted to imitate the revelatory process used to create the Bible. In Thomas Horne’s “Introduction to the Critical Study and knowledge of the Holy Scriptures” (American edition published in Philadelphia in 1825), Horne speculated on that revelatory process. According to Horne, the ancient writers of the Bible studied source documents and were guided by the Spirit in the choice of materials to use. He also believed that they were allowed "to express themselves in the manner that was natural and familiar to them, while at the same time they were preserved from error, in the ideas they conveyed." Horne's method is identical to that of D&C 9:8 - "But, behold, I say unto you, that you must study it out in your mind; then you must cask me if it be right, and if it is right I will cause that your bosom shall eburn within you; therefore, you shall feel that it is right."

The authors of the Bible had records that were purportedly records from the ancient inhabitants of the Old World. Rigdon had a record that purported to be an account of the ancient inhabitants of the New World (from Spalding). Through the Spirit, he could discern truth and prophesy, like the authors of the Bible had done before him. Horne's pattern for revelation was clear. The revelator would study the source records –even committing them to memory– then seek spiritual guidance “as the Spirit gave…utterance”. Others could assist as scribes.

In the next Episode at MormonLeaks, we will show where different kinds of grammar errors appear in the 1830 Book of Mormon.

The frequency of these errors is not random, and neither is the nature of these errors. The highest frequency of grammar errors occurs in the Book of Mosiah and early Alma. In these sections of the text, the most common error is use of "was" for "were". Another common error is called "a-prefixing". Examples of "a-prefixing found in the 1830 Book of Mormon are "a journeying", "a begging", "a marching", "a coming", "a pointing", and "a beginning". These errors and many others found in these sections of the Book of Mormon are used by speakers of Appalachian English. Both Rigdon and Smith likely spoke Appalachian English, and Cowdery is known to have misused "was" for "were". This suggests that the process used to create these sections of the Book of Mormon involved dictation, and that the errors were left uncorrected, perhaps because the authors were allowed "to express themselves in the manner that was natural and familiar".

Other parts of the Book of Mormon, such as parts copied from the KJ Bible and the end of 2 Nephi, have no errors and some have a low error rate (notably parts of Alma likely written by Cowdery and by Spalding).

Some of the text that sounds like grammatically wrong to our modern ears can be attributed to the fact that the authors of the Book of Mormon were attempting to use Early Modern English. They wanted to imitate the sound of the King James Bible. In Episode 5 at MormonLeaks, for example, we show that the Book of Mormon has a strange usage of the word "that" at the beginning and end of the book. This strange usage of "that" is an Early Modern English usage and is linked to usage of the word "wherefore" in text produced after the lost 116 pages incident.

We'll have more to say about this in Episode 6 (forthcoming).

Absurd stories are not inconsistent with contributions from Spalding. Matilda Spalding McKinstry, Solomon Spalding's daughter, told an interviewer that: "Many of his [her father's] descriptions were of a historical and religious character. Others were grotesque and ludicrous in the extreme."

Spalding did not believe in the Bible. It's actually possible that he was satirizing it.

Rigdon was also quite capable of making crazy stuff up. In his late period revelations (the Post Collection), he channels a dead man named Phineas.

Here's one more:

Mrs. Matilda Spalding McKinstry to Ellen E. Dickinson:

January 2d [1880]
Dear Madam yours of the 6th inst. received, and in reply
I will say, 1st that the article in the paper to which
you refer is correct, and it is true that my mother and
myself did carfully compare the so called, "Book of
Mormon," with the romance written by my father entitled
"The Manuscript found," and were convinced that the
"Book of Mormon was a copy of my father's work more or
less disfigured from beginning to end by the founders
of Mormonism, the better to adapt it to their purposes
that of a pretended revelation.

An incontestible proof of the origin of the "Book of
Mormon is manifest in the fact that the "Manuscript
Found was completed about 1813, the names [of] persons,
tribes &c were peculiar to the author, being his
invention in fact. [In] it names of Mormon and his son
Moroni figure conspicuously.

About 1830 the Book of Mormon appeared and contained
the identical names as fictitious history of "The
Manuscript Found which could have been procured from
no other source. Soon after this (1830), meeting[s]
were held by the Mormons at New Salem. Many attended
out of curiosity among others my father's brother, who
at once recognized the "Book of Mormon" as the writing
of his brother.

2nd I most emphatically deny that the Mormons have
any statement from my mother or myself as they claim.
If any purposing to be such exists it is a forgery.

3rd While my father resided at Pittsburg the "Manuscript
was borrowed by one "Patterson" who owned a large book
establishment and printing office. "Sidney Rigdon" was
at that time employed at this office and we have always
believed that he copied it then and there.

Personally I know nothing of the character of the founders
of Mormonism, neither can I give you the address of any
one from whom you could obtain the desired information.

Respectfully yours M. S. McKinstry Monson, Mass.

------------ notes --------------

1. Ref: RLDS Archives (P-13, f2286)

2. This document is almost certainly a holograph letter
written by Matilda Spalding McKinstry, the adopted daughter
of Solomon Spalding and Matilda Sabin Spalding. The
provenance of the letter is Monson, Hampden county, MA,
c. January 1880. Mrs. McKinstry moved to Washington,
D. C. during the first part of 1880, so this letter was
likely written just before her change of residence.

3. Although the circumstantial evidence is not conclusive,
Mrs. McKinstry very likely wrote this letter to her
Mother's brother's daughter, Mrs. Ellen E. Dickinson of
Boston. When Mrs. Dickinson wrote her 1880 and 1881
articles for Scrobner's Monthly, she paraphrased much of
what Mrs. McKinstry says in this letter. Also, Dickinson's
1885 book, New Light on Mormonism, contains some of the
same problematical assertions regarding the origin of the
Book of Mormon as does Mrs. McKinstry's letter.

4. The McKinstry letter was quite possibly forwarded to
Joseph Smith III as an attachment in some lost
correspondence between Mrs. Ellen E. Dickinson and the
RLDS President, c. 1882-85. It is also possible that
the McKinstry letter was sent to the RLDS leadership as
an attachment in the correspondence of some one like
Robert Patterson, Jr. of Pittsburgh, but such an
explanation would not account for how the correspondent
obtained the letter.

5. Mrs. McKinstry does not provide details on how she and
her mother came to have a copy of the Book of Mormon, or
under what circumstances they were able to compare that
book with Rev. Spalding's "Manuscript Found" prior to its
being delivered to D. P. Hurlbut in December 1834.
Presumably the mother and daughter made the comparison
at the home of Jerome Clark.

6. Mrs. McKinstry apparently forgets that she and her
mother gave statements in the late summer of 1839,
edited paraphrases of which were subsequently printed
in numerous Mormon publications. Perhaps she never saw
what was represented as being the LDS-published words
of her mother and herself.

7. McKinstry is mistaken in thinking that Rigdon was
"employed" at the Patterson publishing firm in Pittsburg.
He was acquainted with the printer contracted by that
firm, at least by the early 1820s and almost certainly
as early as 1812-13 -- but Rigdon was never a printer
himself and never worked directly for Patterson.

8. It is unlikely that Solomon Spalding's brother John
ever attended any "meeting[s] held by the Mormons at
New Salem." The more likely scenario would have John
attending a preaching service held by D. P. Hurlbut in
Crawford County, Pennsylvania (near New Salem) early
in 1833, and there confronting Hurlbut on the authorship
of Book of Mormon passages Hurlbut was quoting as a
Mormon missionary. It is slightly possible that Hurlbut
invited John to attend Hurlbut's send-off from Conneaut
(New Salem) in the fall of 1833, when Hurlbut was
soliciting support and funding for his planned trip to
the east -- but that is a doubtful scenario.

UD

Thanks for all the information. I'll have to read the MormonLeaks episodes again and I look forward to the future episodes.