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Hugh Nibley's Book of Mormon Challenge
"I am quietly tearing my hair over the Book of Mormon again. Those chapters are the ones I have worked over the most and are still the least satisfactory."
- Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, to Dale L. Morgan
"Even if it is all made up, to do something like that is really extraordinary... Really, it is. I mean, if it's a work of fiction, nobody has ever done anything like this before."
- Michael Coe, anthropologist
- Fawn Brodie, author of No Man Knows My History, to Dale L. Morgan
"Even if it is all made up, to do something like that is really extraordinary... Really, it is. I mean, if it's a work of fiction, nobody has ever done anything like this before."
- Michael Coe, anthropologist
Though I don't believe in their truth claims, I don't deny that Joseph Smith was a unique creative genius and that the Book of Mormon is an accomplishment most people couldn't manage. And indeed, nobody has ever done anything quite like it since, though many years ago the LDS scholar and BYU professor Hugh Nibley issued a challenge to his students to do just that. I'll share his challenge, additions to it by a later apologist, and then my rebuttal. I know it must be disappointing that I, a writer, decline to take up the challenge myself, but you'll see why.
"Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so experienced or well-educated as any of you at the time he copyrighted the Book of Mormon, it should not be too much to ask you to hand in by the end of the semester (which will give you more time than he had) a paper of, say, five to six hundred pages in length. Call it a sacred book if you will, and give it the form of a history. Tell of a community of wandering Jews in ancient times; have all sorts of characters in your story, and involve them in all sorts of public and private vicissitudes; give them names - hundreds of them - pretending that they are real Hebrew and Egyptian names of circa 600 b.c.; be lavish with cultural and technical details - manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions, include long and complicated military and economic histories; have your narrative cover a thousand years without any large gaps; keep a number of interrelated local histories going at once; feel free to introduce religious controversy and philosophical discussion, but always in a plausible setting; observe the appropriate literary conventions and explain the derivation and transmission of your varied historical materials.
"Above all, do not ever contradict yourself! For now we come to the really hard part of this little assignment. You and I know that you are making this all up - we have our little joke - but just the same you are going to be required to have your paper published when you finish it, not as fiction or romance, but as a true history! After you have handed it in you may make no changes in it (in this class we always use the first edition of the Book of Mormon); what is more, you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely, explaining to them that it is a sacred book on a par with the Bible. If they seem over-skeptical, you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim - they will love that! Further to allay their misgivings, you might tell them that the original manuscript was on golden plates, and that you got the plates from an angel. Now go to work and good luck!
"To date no student has carried out this assignment, which, of course, was not meant seriously. But why not? If anybody could write the Book of Mormon, as we have been so often assured, it is high time that somebody, some devoted and learned minister of the gospel, let us say, performed the invaluable public service of showing the world that it can be done."
"Since Joseph Smith was younger than most of you and not nearly so experienced or well-educated as any of you at the time he copyrighted the Book of Mormon, it should not be too much to ask you to hand in by the end of the semester (which will give you more time than he had) a paper of, say, five to six hundred pages in length. Call it a sacred book if you will, and give it the form of a history. Tell of a community of wandering Jews in ancient times; have all sorts of characters in your story, and involve them in all sorts of public and private vicissitudes; give them names - hundreds of them - pretending that they are real Hebrew and Egyptian names of circa 600 b.c.; be lavish with cultural and technical details - manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions, include long and complicated military and economic histories; have your narrative cover a thousand years without any large gaps; keep a number of interrelated local histories going at once; feel free to introduce religious controversy and philosophical discussion, but always in a plausible setting; observe the appropriate literary conventions and explain the derivation and transmission of your varied historical materials.
"Above all, do not ever contradict yourself! For now we come to the really hard part of this little assignment. You and I know that you are making this all up - we have our little joke - but just the same you are going to be required to have your paper published when you finish it, not as fiction or romance, but as a true history! After you have handed it in you may make no changes in it (in this class we always use the first edition of the Book of Mormon); what is more, you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely, explaining to them that it is a sacred book on a par with the Bible. If they seem over-skeptical, you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim - they will love that! Further to allay their misgivings, you might tell them that the original manuscript was on golden plates, and that you got the plates from an angel. Now go to work and good luck!
"To date no student has carried out this assignment, which, of course, was not meant seriously. But why not? If anybody could write the Book of Mormon, as we have been so often assured, it is high time that somebody, some devoted and learned minister of the gospel, let us say, performed the invaluable public service of showing the world that it can be done."
Additions to the Book of Mormon Challenge
To steelman the challenge and make my rebuttal more interesting, here's more from apologist Alan C. Miner: "To this I would like to add some additional challenges, though it shouldn’t be hard, living as we do in the computer world of the internet:
"Because your story is supposed to be a religious record, include in your paper more than 500 different descriptive titles for deity, all within a proper religious context that will not only explain these titles in relation to what we have in the Bible, but give added meaning and understanding.
"Because this is supposedly an ancient Hebrew record, give numerous and multiple examples of ancient Parallelistic Hebrew literary forms. Have whole pages, even chapters and larger sections written in Parallelistic (chiastic) patterns.
"Weave in an underlying theme of covenants with the Lord, both culturally and scripturally. In fact, it would be a good idea to make every part of your narrative not only covenant-related, but Christ-related as well.
"Dictate your story to a scribe. Confirm spelling of proper names so they correctly reflect the language found in the ancient setting of your story. Leave your script as you dictate it, and never ask your scribe to tell you where you left off after lunch or the end of a day.
"On his own, your scribe can adjust capitalization, punctuation, the spelling of traditional words, and some simple grammar, but that is all.
"Dictate parts of your story in non-chronological order. Be sure to credit these parts of your story to different writers, varying your manner of using words and phrases so that a distinct separation of language style can be detected by modern word print analysis.
"These requirements demonstrate that Joseph Smith was quoting from a previously written script (the Gold Plates) rather than making it up as he went along. Add twelve witnesses who verified that in the case of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, all the above requirements were met.
"The Book of Mormon has withstood 174 years of intense scrutiny, both pro and con, and stands as a tangible witness that it is exactly as it has been purported to be - a divine book written and translated by the gift and power of God."
And just because I'm a good sport, I'll steelman the challenge even further myself with points that a believer would bring up as a last resort: Ensure that millions of people receive spiritual witnesses of your fictional book by praying about it. For your final exam, be willing to give up your life rather than renounce its authenticity - but please don't actually do it. I don't want that on my conscience.
"Because your story is supposed to be a religious record, include in your paper more than 500 different descriptive titles for deity, all within a proper religious context that will not only explain these titles in relation to what we have in the Bible, but give added meaning and understanding.
"Because this is supposedly an ancient Hebrew record, give numerous and multiple examples of ancient Parallelistic Hebrew literary forms. Have whole pages, even chapters and larger sections written in Parallelistic (chiastic) patterns.
"Weave in an underlying theme of covenants with the Lord, both culturally and scripturally. In fact, it would be a good idea to make every part of your narrative not only covenant-related, but Christ-related as well.
"Dictate your story to a scribe. Confirm spelling of proper names so they correctly reflect the language found in the ancient setting of your story. Leave your script as you dictate it, and never ask your scribe to tell you where you left off after lunch or the end of a day.
"On his own, your scribe can adjust capitalization, punctuation, the spelling of traditional words, and some simple grammar, but that is all.
"Dictate parts of your story in non-chronological order. Be sure to credit these parts of your story to different writers, varying your manner of using words and phrases so that a distinct separation of language style can be detected by modern word print analysis.
"These requirements demonstrate that Joseph Smith was quoting from a previously written script (the Gold Plates) rather than making it up as he went along. Add twelve witnesses who verified that in the case of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, all the above requirements were met.
"The Book of Mormon has withstood 174 years of intense scrutiny, both pro and con, and stands as a tangible witness that it is exactly as it has been purported to be - a divine book written and translated by the gift and power of God."
And just because I'm a good sport, I'll steelman the challenge even further myself with points that a believer would bring up as a last resort: Ensure that millions of people receive spiritual witnesses of your fictional book by praying about it. For your final exam, be willing to give up your life rather than renounce its authenticity - but please don't actually do it. I don't want that on my conscience.
Why the Book of Mormon Challenge Doesn't Work
(And Neither Does the Book of Mormon)
I should note from the outset that Joseph Smith didn't write the Book of Mormon as such, he dictated it, which is a different skill that a lot fewer people have developed in the modern world. People in the nineteenth century got good at crafting elaborate oral stories because they had fewer entertainment options, and Smith seems to have been exceptional at it. (And although his first wife, Emma, would famously claim much later that he "could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter," he wrote a letter in 1829 that was just as coherent and well-worded as the printer's manuscript of the Book of Mormon.) I can imagine LDS apologists rolling their eyes already, but people with exceptional talents are a lot more common than angels with golden plates, and it shouldn't be surprising that once in a while one of them accomplishes something big. Critics go too far if they assert that "anybody could write the Book of Mormon." On the other hand, nobody could write the Book of Mormon according to the requirements of this challenge, several of which are misleading or simply wrong.
Nibley claims that a semester is "more time than he would have had," referring to the oft-cited claim that Joseph Smith translated the book in 85 days. However, Smith claimed that the angel Moroni first told him about the golden plates on the night of September 21, 1823, giving him at least five and a half years to brainstorm the story before he even started to dictate it (and probably longer, since it's unlikely he came up with the idea and committed to it that very night). His mother later wrote of this period in her biography of him: "During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelings, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them." (Brigham Young called this book "a tissue of lies" and tried to have every copy destroyed.) Smith even got a bit of a practice run when he dictated the original 116 pages and then didn't reproduce them after Martin Harris lost them, as he would have been able to do if he'd actually received them by revelation. Getting it done in 85 days isn't miraculous either, though it would be harder for a modern college student to pull off. There are 273,725 words in the Book of Mormon, so if Oliver Cowdery could write 1,200 words an hour like most scribes, they only needed to work on it for three hours a day - and they had the luxury of working on it full-time during those 85 days, at one point even subsidized with food and paper by Joseph Knight Sr. In contrast, I assume Nibley's students had other classes, homework, and jobs.
Nibley also portrays the Book of Mormon's contents as more impressive than they actually are. He neglects to inform his students that, like Joseph Smith, they can copy up to 15% of their book's text from the King James Bible with minor changes. He requires "all sorts of characters" with "hundreds of [names]" but doesn't acknowledge that 149 of the Book of Mormon's 337 names are from the Bible, that most names/characters are mentioned once and immediately forgotten, or that a few names (Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Moroni) are used for multiple major characters. He asserts that the challenge offering must "cover a thousand years without any large gaps," but the Book of Mormon doesn't do that. The books of Enos, Jarom, Omni, and Words of Mormon cover more than three hundred years in nine pages. The book of 4th Nephi covers two hundred eighty-six years in four pages. Nibley refers to the "religious controversy and philosophical discussion" without mentioning that all of this controversy and discussion came from early nineteenth-century American Protestantism, not the Book of Mormon's supposed ancient American Jewish setting. Alexander Campbell wrote in an 1832 pamphlet, "This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his Book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N[ew] York for the last ten years. He decided all the great controversies: -- infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the questions of free masonry, republican government and the rights of man." LDS scholar Richard Bushman has said "that there is phrasing everywhere - long phrases that if you google them you will find them in 19th century writings. The theology of the Book of Mormon is very much 19th century theology, and it reads like a 19th century understanding of the Hebrew Bible as an Old Testament."
Nibley says, "Above all, do not ever contradict yourself!" But the Book of Mormon does contradict itself. In 1 Nephi 12:18 in the first edition, Nephi identifies Jesus Christ by name, but in 2 Nephi 10:3, Jacob reveals for the first time that Christ will be his name. Later editions fixed the former verse, though the latter is still wrong because Christ isn't a name, but a title (derived from the Greek word for Messiah). Then centuries later, King Benjamin doesn't know the name/title at all. Nephi knows exactly when Jesus will come, but centuries later, Alma doesn't. Nephi knows that the Lamanites won't annihilate the Nephites until 400 years after Jesus comes, but centuries later, Captain Moroni doesn't. Nephi (anachronistically) paraphrases Malachi 4:1 four times (1 Nephi 22:15, 23, 2 Nephi 26:4, 6) and Malachi 4:2 thrice (1 Nephi 22:24, 2 Nephi 25:13, 26:9), but centuries later, Jesus reveals those scriptures to the Nephites because they don't have them. Most of these contradictions obviously arose because, after the loss of the 116 pages, Smith dictated the rest of the story before he went back and dictated the first two books. Jacob 1:11 claims that the Nephite kings were all called Nephi, but this practice is never mentioned again. Jacob's parable switches from an olive tree to a vineyard halfway through because it's plagiarized from unrelated biblical passages (primarily Isaiah 5:1-7 and Romans 11:16-24, with help from Luke 13:6-9, Matthew 3:10, and John 15:6). Mosiah 2:13 says that King Benjamin outlawed slavery among the Nephites, but Alma 27:9 says that his successor Mosiah did. Mosiah 21:28 and Ether 4:1 in the first edition likewise both refer to King Benjamin instead of Mosiah; later editions fixed this. (Note, however, that neither of them is called Nephi.) The narrative in Alma 56 abruptly switches from first to third person and back again just as fast. (The footnote to Alma 56:52, added much later, claims without citation that "Mormon here abridges some of the material in the letter of Helaman.") There are also over a hundred spots where the text corrects or clarifies itself with "or," "or rather," "that is," or "in other words," which sound a lot more like Smith stumbling in his extemporaneous dictation than ancient authors carefully etching their words into metal plates with severe space constraints.
That's not even getting into the contradictions between the Book of Mormon's generic Protestant theology and the distinctive LDS doctrines that Smith introduced after its publication, which I can't resist mentioning even though they' re beyond the scope of this challenge. If future anthropologists try to reconstruct a religion based on this book, they won't come up with anything that resembles The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Nibley says that "you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely." He seems to choose his words carefully here, implying without actually claiming that the Book of Mormon has withstood scholarly criticism. It hasn't. Virtually no scholar outside one of the few churches that accepts it as scripture takes it seriously as an ancient record. Its "manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions," lavishly detailed though they be, are not accurate enough in light of current knowledge to convince any skeptical outsider that the book is a real history of indigenous Americans. Only those who already believe in it based on a supposed spiritual witness or cultural pressure find the secular evidence compelling. It would be too much of a tangent to discuss that evidence in detail here. Most scholars who know anything about the Book of Mormon regard it as an obvious work of fiction, just as they would regard any submission to the Book of Mormon challenge. Nibley says "you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim" - which is ironic because while Smith did make that claim at times, the LDS Church has since acknowledged that most of the alleged translation was done with a folk magic "seer stone" that he "borrowed" from someone who found it while digging a well. Smith had previously used this same stone to grift people by claiming he could see buried treasure, which magically slipped deeper into the earth whenever they got close to it. This creates a very different context for the Book of Mormon's origin (and may explain the slippery treasures in Helaman 13:31-36 and Mormon 1:18). Nibley can't be faulted too much here, because in his time, the church framed the seer stone as an anti-Mormon lie.
To Alan C. Miner's addendum, I would respond that chiasmus is not exclusive to Hebraic or ancient writings. And maybe it's cheating to add to his requirements, but I just want to request that if you "weave in an underlying theme of covenants with the Lord," you don't make it horrifically racist like the one in the Book of Mormon, which teaches that because the ancestors of Native Americans broke their covenants with the Lord, they were cursed with dark skin and brought their displacement from "the land of promise" by European settlers upon themselves. I have no moral objection to making every part of the narrative Christ-related, but be advised that it actually makes every part of the narrative anachronistic. I don't know what it means for the spelling of names to "correctly reflect the language found in the ancient setting of your story" because the Book of Mormon purports to have been translated from reformed Egyptian, a fictional language that obviously wouldn't use the Latin alphabet even if it were real (though many of the characters transcribed by Smith do look like deformed and reoriented Latin letters). The reliability of wordprint analysis is up for debate. And finally, twelve witnesses did not verify "that in the case of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, all the above requirements were met." Eight witnesses claimed that they saw and handled the gold plates, while three witnesses claimed that an angel showed them the plates. Mary Whitmer, the mother of five of these eleven witnesses, is often cited as an additional witness who was shown the plates by Moroni, but she never made that claim publicly. The first record we have of it is a secondhand account by her son David in November 1878, nearly twenty-three years after her death and fifty years after the alleged event. This account contradicts Smith's description of Moroni and another account by her grandson John that claims she always called the angel "Brother Nephi" but must have really meant Moroni. It would, again, be off-topic to debate the value of these witnesses as evidence for the Book of Mormon, but my point here is that they knew little or nothing about the requirements listed by Alan C. Miner or Hugh Nibley. At this point, only Oliver Cowdery had even read the book. And again, no, it has not withstood scrutiny.
Now on to my own criteria. Again, although I'm responding to myself, these are things a believer would bring up. So-called "spiritual witnesses" are a funny thing. People receive them in every religion, including polygamous sects and suicide cults, and bear equally emotional testimonies about the truth of said religions. Because feelings are individual and subjective, no one can reasonably claim to know that their "spiritual witness" is more valid than everyone else's. I do believe that if you complete this challenge, you actually will be able to get some number of people - which might, in a couple of centuries, grow to millions - to receive "spiritual witnesses" of the end product. And when someone prays about it and nothing happens, you can do what the LDS Church does. Either tell them that they need to keep praying indefinitely until they do feel something or that the lack of feeling means that God knows that they already know it's true. Make sure that the option of your book not being true is off the table. This kind of manipulation will become easier as your following becomes multi-generational and people are conditioned from birth to think your book is a greater work of literature and a more miraculous accomplishment than it actually is, as Nibley exemplifies with the misleading and incorrect requirements of this challenge. Having said that, I do think the Book of Mormon has some beautiful messages and theology, and if someone feels that their life is made better by reading it, good for them. I just hope they don't believe the racist parts.
Joseph Smith wasn't the only self-proclaimed modern prophet to die for his religion - Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite did as well, and two of them apparently were such strong believers that they killed themselves. And Joseph Smith was not killed for writing the Book of Mormon. He was killed for illegally practicing polygamy, illegally ordering the destruction of a printing press that exposed his practice of polygamy, and giving himself so much power through the Nauvoo City Charter that people couldn't trust the judicial system to hold him accountable. And by then he'd painted himself into a corner. Renouncing the Book of Mormon and his prophetic calling wouldn't likely have placated the mob, and even if it did, his own followers who had sacrificed, suffered persecution, and lost loved ones for his religion would have lynched him themselves.
Nibley claims that a semester is "more time than he would have had," referring to the oft-cited claim that Joseph Smith translated the book in 85 days. However, Smith claimed that the angel Moroni first told him about the golden plates on the night of September 21, 1823, giving him at least five and a half years to brainstorm the story before he even started to dictate it (and probably longer, since it's unlikely he came up with the idea and committed to it that very night). His mother later wrote of this period in her biography of him: "During our evening conversations, Joseph would occasionally give us some of the most amusing recitals that could be imagined. He would describe the ancient inhabitants of this continent, their dress, mode of travelings, and the animals upon which they rode; their cities, their buildings, with every particular; their mode of warfare; and also their religious worship. This he would do with as much ease, seemingly, as if he had spent his whole life among them." (Brigham Young called this book "a tissue of lies" and tried to have every copy destroyed.) Smith even got a bit of a practice run when he dictated the original 116 pages and then didn't reproduce them after Martin Harris lost them, as he would have been able to do if he'd actually received them by revelation. Getting it done in 85 days isn't miraculous either, though it would be harder for a modern college student to pull off. There are 273,725 words in the Book of Mormon, so if Oliver Cowdery could write 1,200 words an hour like most scribes, they only needed to work on it for three hours a day - and they had the luxury of working on it full-time during those 85 days, at one point even subsidized with food and paper by Joseph Knight Sr. In contrast, I assume Nibley's students had other classes, homework, and jobs.
Nibley also portrays the Book of Mormon's contents as more impressive than they actually are. He neglects to inform his students that, like Joseph Smith, they can copy up to 15% of their book's text from the King James Bible with minor changes. He requires "all sorts of characters" with "hundreds of [names]" but doesn't acknowledge that 149 of the Book of Mormon's 337 names are from the Bible, that most names/characters are mentioned once and immediately forgotten, or that a few names (Nephi, Lehi, Alma, Moroni) are used for multiple major characters. He asserts that the challenge offering must "cover a thousand years without any large gaps," but the Book of Mormon doesn't do that. The books of Enos, Jarom, Omni, and Words of Mormon cover more than three hundred years in nine pages. The book of 4th Nephi covers two hundred eighty-six years in four pages. Nibley refers to the "religious controversy and philosophical discussion" without mentioning that all of this controversy and discussion came from early nineteenth-century American Protestantism, not the Book of Mormon's supposed ancient American Jewish setting. Alexander Campbell wrote in an 1832 pamphlet, "This prophet Smith, through his stone spectacles, wrote on the plates of Nephi, in his Book of Mormon, every error and almost every truth discussed in N[ew] York for the last ten years. He decided all the great controversies: -- infant baptism, ordination, the trinity, regeneration, repentance, justification, the fall of man, the atonement, transubstantiation, fasting penance, church government, religious experience, the call to the ministry, the general resurrection, eternal punishment, who may baptize, and even the questions of free masonry, republican government and the rights of man." LDS scholar Richard Bushman has said "that there is phrasing everywhere - long phrases that if you google them you will find them in 19th century writings. The theology of the Book of Mormon is very much 19th century theology, and it reads like a 19th century understanding of the Hebrew Bible as an Old Testament."
Nibley says, "Above all, do not ever contradict yourself!" But the Book of Mormon does contradict itself. In 1 Nephi 12:18 in the first edition, Nephi identifies Jesus Christ by name, but in 2 Nephi 10:3, Jacob reveals for the first time that Christ will be his name. Later editions fixed the former verse, though the latter is still wrong because Christ isn't a name, but a title (derived from the Greek word for Messiah). Then centuries later, King Benjamin doesn't know the name/title at all. Nephi knows exactly when Jesus will come, but centuries later, Alma doesn't. Nephi knows that the Lamanites won't annihilate the Nephites until 400 years after Jesus comes, but centuries later, Captain Moroni doesn't. Nephi (anachronistically) paraphrases Malachi 4:1 four times (1 Nephi 22:15, 23, 2 Nephi 26:4, 6) and Malachi 4:2 thrice (1 Nephi 22:24, 2 Nephi 25:13, 26:9), but centuries later, Jesus reveals those scriptures to the Nephites because they don't have them. Most of these contradictions obviously arose because, after the loss of the 116 pages, Smith dictated the rest of the story before he went back and dictated the first two books. Jacob 1:11 claims that the Nephite kings were all called Nephi, but this practice is never mentioned again. Jacob's parable switches from an olive tree to a vineyard halfway through because it's plagiarized from unrelated biblical passages (primarily Isaiah 5:1-7 and Romans 11:16-24, with help from Luke 13:6-9, Matthew 3:10, and John 15:6). Mosiah 2:13 says that King Benjamin outlawed slavery among the Nephites, but Alma 27:9 says that his successor Mosiah did. Mosiah 21:28 and Ether 4:1 in the first edition likewise both refer to King Benjamin instead of Mosiah; later editions fixed this. (Note, however, that neither of them is called Nephi.) The narrative in Alma 56 abruptly switches from first to third person and back again just as fast. (The footnote to Alma 56:52, added much later, claims without citation that "Mormon here abridges some of the material in the letter of Helaman.") There are also over a hundred spots where the text corrects or clarifies itself with "or," "or rather," "that is," or "in other words," which sound a lot more like Smith stumbling in his extemporaneous dictation than ancient authors carefully etching their words into metal plates with severe space constraints.
That's not even getting into the contradictions between the Book of Mormon's generic Protestant theology and the distinctive LDS doctrines that Smith introduced after its publication, which I can't resist mentioning even though they' re beyond the scope of this challenge. If future anthropologists try to reconstruct a religion based on this book, they won't come up with anything that resembles The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Nibley says that "you are to invite any and all scholars to read and criticize your work freely." He seems to choose his words carefully here, implying without actually claiming that the Book of Mormon has withstood scholarly criticism. It hasn't. Virtually no scholar outside one of the few churches that accepts it as scripture takes it seriously as an ancient record. Its "manners and customs, arts and industries, political and religious institutions, rites, and traditions," lavishly detailed though they be, are not accurate enough in light of current knowledge to convince any skeptical outsider that the book is a real history of indigenous Americans. Only those who already believe in it based on a supposed spiritual witness or cultural pressure find the secular evidence compelling. It would be too much of a tangent to discuss that evidence in detail here. Most scholars who know anything about the Book of Mormon regard it as an obvious work of fiction, just as they would regard any submission to the Book of Mormon challenge. Nibley says "you might tell them that you translated the book from original records by the aid of the Urim and Thummim" - which is ironic because while Smith did make that claim at times, the LDS Church has since acknowledged that most of the alleged translation was done with a folk magic "seer stone" that he "borrowed" from someone who found it while digging a well. Smith had previously used this same stone to grift people by claiming he could see buried treasure, which magically slipped deeper into the earth whenever they got close to it. This creates a very different context for the Book of Mormon's origin (and may explain the slippery treasures in Helaman 13:31-36 and Mormon 1:18). Nibley can't be faulted too much here, because in his time, the church framed the seer stone as an anti-Mormon lie.
To Alan C. Miner's addendum, I would respond that chiasmus is not exclusive to Hebraic or ancient writings. And maybe it's cheating to add to his requirements, but I just want to request that if you "weave in an underlying theme of covenants with the Lord," you don't make it horrifically racist like the one in the Book of Mormon, which teaches that because the ancestors of Native Americans broke their covenants with the Lord, they were cursed with dark skin and brought their displacement from "the land of promise" by European settlers upon themselves. I have no moral objection to making every part of the narrative Christ-related, but be advised that it actually makes every part of the narrative anachronistic. I don't know what it means for the spelling of names to "correctly reflect the language found in the ancient setting of your story" because the Book of Mormon purports to have been translated from reformed Egyptian, a fictional language that obviously wouldn't use the Latin alphabet even if it were real (though many of the characters transcribed by Smith do look like deformed and reoriented Latin letters). The reliability of wordprint analysis is up for debate. And finally, twelve witnesses did not verify "that in the case of Joseph Smith’s translation of the Book of Mormon, all the above requirements were met." Eight witnesses claimed that they saw and handled the gold plates, while three witnesses claimed that an angel showed them the plates. Mary Whitmer, the mother of five of these eleven witnesses, is often cited as an additional witness who was shown the plates by Moroni, but she never made that claim publicly. The first record we have of it is a secondhand account by her son David in November 1878, nearly twenty-three years after her death and fifty years after the alleged event. This account contradicts Smith's description of Moroni and another account by her grandson John that claims she always called the angel "Brother Nephi" but must have really meant Moroni. It would, again, be off-topic to debate the value of these witnesses as evidence for the Book of Mormon, but my point here is that they knew little or nothing about the requirements listed by Alan C. Miner or Hugh Nibley. At this point, only Oliver Cowdery had even read the book. And again, no, it has not withstood scrutiny.
Now on to my own criteria. Again, although I'm responding to myself, these are things a believer would bring up. So-called "spiritual witnesses" are a funny thing. People receive them in every religion, including polygamous sects and suicide cults, and bear equally emotional testimonies about the truth of said religions. Because feelings are individual and subjective, no one can reasonably claim to know that their "spiritual witness" is more valid than everyone else's. I do believe that if you complete this challenge, you actually will be able to get some number of people - which might, in a couple of centuries, grow to millions - to receive "spiritual witnesses" of the end product. And when someone prays about it and nothing happens, you can do what the LDS Church does. Either tell them that they need to keep praying indefinitely until they do feel something or that the lack of feeling means that God knows that they already know it's true. Make sure that the option of your book not being true is off the table. This kind of manipulation will become easier as your following becomes multi-generational and people are conditioned from birth to think your book is a greater work of literature and a more miraculous accomplishment than it actually is, as Nibley exemplifies with the misleading and incorrect requirements of this challenge. Having said that, I do think the Book of Mormon has some beautiful messages and theology, and if someone feels that their life is made better by reading it, good for them. I just hope they don't believe the racist parts.
Joseph Smith wasn't the only self-proclaimed modern prophet to die for his religion - Jim Jones, David Koresh, and Marshall Applewhite did as well, and two of them apparently were such strong believers that they killed themselves. And Joseph Smith was not killed for writing the Book of Mormon. He was killed for illegally practicing polygamy, illegally ordering the destruction of a printing press that exposed his practice of polygamy, and giving himself so much power through the Nauvoo City Charter that people couldn't trust the judicial system to hold him accountable. And by then he'd painted himself into a corner. Renouncing the Book of Mormon and his prophetic calling wouldn't likely have placated the mob, and even if it did, his own followers who had sacrificed, suffered persecution, and lost loved ones for his religion would have lynched him themselves.
The Mormon Rebuttals to My Rebuttal
Main Page: LDS Scriptures
