KJV Errors, Italics, and the JST in the Book of Mormon

Jeremy Runnells says King James wording in the Book of Mormon — 1769 “errors,” italic filler words “word for word,” and passages the JST later revised — proves Joseph copied a Bible. Every observation is real. But Jeremy measured only the overlap and stopped. Test the places where the Book of Mormon departs from the King James text and the copying theory collapses — and his flagship example turns out to run backwards.

The Claim

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter argues that the Book of Mormon reproduces errors unique to the 1769 King James edition, along with 17th-century King James italicized words carried over “word for word” — features it says could not appear in a genuinely ancient record.

The CES Letter’s Argument

The CES Letter asks how the Book of Mormon can carry the “incorrect” King James Sermon on the Mount rather than matching the “correct” wording of Joseph Smith’s later Joseph Smith Translation.

Three claims, one thesis: King James language in the Book of Mormon means Joseph had a King James Bible open in front of him. Grant the honest part at once. The Book of Mormon’s biblical chapters do track the 1769 Blayney revision of the King James text closely. Latter-day Saint scholars have said so in print for over a century — B. H. Roberts discussed it in the early 1900s, and Blake Ostler laid out the “expansion” model in Dialogue in 1987, long before the CES Letter treated King James overlap as a hidden bombshell. The real question was never whether King James phrasing is present. It is what that presence proves.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

At the King James overlap the evidence forks two ways, and Jeremy took the simpler branch.

The path Jeremy chose — mechanical copying: King James wording is present, therefore the text was transcribed word-for-word from a King James Bible, therefore it is a fraud. Clean, requires no examination of the data, and lands as a knockout in one sentence.

The path he ignored — King James as the vehicle: Joseph rendered an ancient record into the one sacred English his 1829 neighbors knew by heart, exactly as every English translator of that generation did. King James phrasing is the medium, not the source.

The second path is not the charitable choice; it is the one the data forces, because it makes a hard prediction the first cannot survive. If King James English is only the vehicle, then wherever the ancient source differs from the King James, the Book of Mormon should break away from it — selectively, systematically, in patterns no copyist and no unschooled farmhand could fake. That is precisely what the text does, in the italics, in the Sermon, and in readings older than 1611. Jeremy measured the overlap and walked past the divergences. The divergences decide the case.

The Evidence

1. “Word for word” is empirically false

Take the strongest form of Jeremy’s best point, because it deserves it. King James translators printed in italics the words they supplied to make the English read smoothly — words with no counterpart in the underlying Hebrew or Greek. So the objection is genuinely sharp: if those supplied English words appear in the Book of Mormon, they can only have come from a King James Bible, because they were never in any ancient text to begin with. The old reply that “the same Hebrew required the same expansion” does not answer this, and should be retired — by definition the italic marks a place where the Hebrew supplied nothing. “Word for word” is the claim that these words carry over intact.

They don’t. This is not an interpretation; it is a count. In a careful study of the Isaiah material, Stan Spencer found that in his sample chapters roughly 41 percent of the King James italicized words are missing from the Book of Mormon — against about 1 percent of the non-italicized words (“Missing Words,” Interpreter, 2020). The italics are dropped at roughly forty times the rate of ordinary words.

Sit with what that does to the copying theory. A man transcribing a King James Bible copies the italics along with everything else — he cannot even see which words are italic unless he is deliberately hunting them, and he has no reason to delete a third of them. The one class of words that a copyist should reproduce most faithfully — the ones carrying the King James fingerprint — is exactly the class the Book of Mormon treats differently. The italics are not evidence of copying. They are the clearest single signal that something other than passive copying produced this text.

What, then, did produce it? Faithful scholars hold more than one view, and the question of mechanism is genuinely open: B. H. Roberts pointed to variants on the ancient plates; believing scholar Brant Gardner holds that Nephi actively adapted and “likened” Isaiah to his people, as Nephi says he did (1 Nephi 19:23); Spencer credits the revelatory dictation itself. But every one of these presupposes an ancient text engaged through King James idiom, and none is compatible with a farmhand transcribing a Bible. The one theory the italics rule out is Jeremy’s.

2. The 1769 edition is what the model predicts, not what it fears

Jeremy is right that the Book of Mormon’s biblical quotations follow the 1769 revision circulating in Joseph’s America, not the 1611 first printing, and he treats this as a checkmate. On the “vehicle” model it is a prediction. If God delivered an ancient record to a young farmer in the scriptural English his neighbors actually read, that English would of course be the King James of 1829 — not of 1611, and certainly not some reconstructed Reformation dialect no American had ever heard. The Lord describes the process in D&C 8:2–3 as revelation “in your mind and in your heart,” not a letter-for-letter cipher. The buried assumption in Jeremy’s argument is that revelation is forbidden from speaking in the idiom the recipient knows — but translators always render into the living language of their readers; that is what translation is. The dialect of the vehicle tells you when and where a translation happened, not whether there was a source. That question of method — the tight-versus-loose translation debate Latter-day Saint scholars have carried on for decades — is treated on our companion page, The Book of Mormon Translation Method. Once King James English is granted as the medium, only the departures can adjudicate the source. So examine them.

3. The Sermon at the Temple: Jeremy’s example runs backwards

Jeremy’s sharpest challenge is the Sermon. His logic: the Book of Mormon (3 Nephi 12–14) matches the “incorrect” King James Sermon on the Mount, and Joseph’s own later JST revises that same text — so how could the Book of Mormon be the correct original if Joseph himself revised it afterward? Take his strongest single instance and follow it all the way down.

The most significant textual change in the entire Sermon is Matthew 5:22. The King James reads: “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment.” That phrase — “without a cause” — is absent from the oldest and best Greek manuscripts; nearly every modern critical edition drops it, because it softens the Savior’s teaching into a loophole. Joseph’s JST removes it too.

Now read the Book of Mormon. 3 Nephi 12:22: “whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of his judgment.” No “without a cause.” And it has read that way since the 1830 first edition — years before Joseph revised Matthew in the JST.

The reversal

At the one place in the Sermon where the King James text carries a genuine, well-known corruption, the Book of Mormon already had the better reading in 1830 — agreeing with the earliest manuscripts and anticipating the JST that came later.

This is fatal to the way Jeremy framed the point. He asked why the Book of Mormon has “the incorrect… passage” and fails to “match the correct JST.” At the decisive verse it does the opposite: the Book of Mormon and the JST agree, both against the King James, and the Book of Mormon got there first. A copyist working from an 1829 King James Bible would have written “without a cause,” because that is what his source said. The dictated text silently gave the higher reading. That is not the footprint of plagiarism. It is the footprint of an independent witness to the Savior’s words.

The framing error underneath the question is treating the JST as a machine that outputs one “correct” text, so that any daylight between it and the Book of Mormon is a contradiction. It is not. The Sermon at the Temple in 3 Nephi is the resurrected Christ ministering to a Nephite congregation in their own covenant setting; the JST is an inspired engagement with the transmitted biblical record. Kent P. Jackson, a co-editor of the definitive scholarly edition of the JST, has shown that Joseph never claimed it recovered a single lost autograph — it is inspired commentary and expansion. Two inspired renderings of related teaching no more contradict each other than Matthew and Luke do for wording the Sermon differently — and where a change genuinely mattered, both landed on the same higher reading.

4. What a copyist could not have produced

The italics and the Sermon show the copying theory failing on its own examples. A third class of evidence shows it failing on material Joseph could not have reached at all. Consider 2 Nephi 12:16, quoting Isaiah 2:16. The King James reads “upon all the ships of Tarshish.” The Book of Mormon reads: “upon all the ships of the sea, and upon all the ships of Tarshish.” That extra first line — “ships of the sea” — is not in the King James and not in the Hebrew Masoretic Text, but is present in the ancient Greek Septuagint. The Book of Mormon uniquely carries both readings together.

A man copying an 1829 King James Bible produces the King James line and nothing more. He does not add a phrase that survives only in the Greek Old Testament — a text he could not read and almost certainly never held. This is the pattern the “vehicle, not source” reading predicts and the copying theory forbids: at the overlap the Book of Mormon sounds King James; at the divergences it reaches behind the King James to readings older than 1611. The fuller catalog is laid out on ldsapologetics.com’s treatment of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon and in the Book of Mormon evidences survey.

One honest caution, so the case is not overstated: not every proposed “ancient variant” is equally strong, and a handful are genuinely contested among textual scholars. The case does not rest on any one verse. It rests on the direction of the whole body of divergences — italics, Sermon, Septuagint readings — which points one way: away from an 1829 Bible on a farmhouse table.

5. The Deutero-Isaiah question, handled honestly

Behind the KJV-Isaiah point sits a deeper one Jeremy gestures at: many critical scholars date Isaiah 40–55 (“Deutero-Isaiah”) to late in the Babylonian exile (around 540 BC), later than Lehi’s departure around 600 BC — yet the Book of Mormon quotes those chapters. This is a real scholarly question and we will not pretend it is closed. Two observations keep it in proportion. First, the multiple-authorship theory rests heavily on the premise that detailed predictive prophecy cannot occur — a premise a believer in revelation need not grant, and one a number of scholars dispute on literary grounds. The Great Isaiah Scroll from Qumran, our oldest complete copy, presents Isaiah as one continuous book with no seam at chapter 40. Second, a farmer fabricating scripture from an 1829 Bible would have had no awareness of the Deutero-Isaiah debate, a specialist discussion barely present in rural New York; that an alleged forger would unknowingly quote straight across the very boundary later critics would draw, as if it were seamless, is not what the fraud theory predicts.

Further Study

The Verdict

Resolved. Grant Jeremy every factual observation and his conclusion still does not follow, because it was smuggled in through an unstated premise: that a real translation could only be a mechanical, vacuum-sealed restoration. “Word for word” is false by direct count — the Book of Mormon drops King James italics at roughly forty times the rate of ordinary words. His flagship Sermon example runs backwards: at the one verse that matters, 3 Nephi 12:22 dropped “without a cause” in 1830, agreeing with the earliest manuscripts and the later JST against the King James. And the text carries readings — like the Septuagint’s “ships of the sea” — that reach behind the King James to sources Joseph could not access. King James phrasing is the medium of an inspired translation, not the smoking gun of a fraud. The fork Jeremy took — overlap equals copying — is the one the data forecloses.

Genuinely open — and only mildly. Two honest loose ends remain, and neither touches the core. The dating and unity of Isaiah is an unsettled question in biblical scholarship; the faithful reading is well defended but not the only serious one. And the precise mechanism behind the biblical chapters — ancient variants on the plates, Nephi’s own likening, or the character of the revelatory dictation — is a live conversation among believing scholars. But that is a family discussion about how an ancient text reached us in King James dress, not a doubt about whether it is ancient. On the only question Jeremy actually raised, the verdict is not close.

Sources: Stan Spencer, “Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith as an Unlearned Reader,” Interpreter (2020); Blake T. Ostler, “The Book of Mormon as a Modern Expansion of an Ancient Source,” Dialogue 20/1 (1987); John W. Welch, Illuminating the Sermon at the Temple & the Sermon on the Mount (FARMS, 1999); Kent P. Jackson, The King James Bible and the Restoration (BYU RSC, 2011); Donald W. Parry & John W. Welch, eds., Isaiah in the Book of Mormon (FARMS, 1998); Royal Skousen, Analysis of Textual Variants of the Book of Mormon (BYU Studies, 2004–2009).