Book of Mormon — Sources

Was the Book of Mormon Plagiarized from View of the Hebrews and The Late War?

The CES Letter lists dozens of “parallels” between the Book of Mormon and three earlier books and lets the accumulation imply a verdict. But counting parallels is the easy path. Weighing them — the way any historian tests a claim of literary dependency — leads somewhere else entirely.

What the CES Letter Claims

The CES Letter’s Argument

Ethan Smith’s View of the Hebrews (1823) shares a striking list of parallels with the Book of Mormon: Hebrews migrating to the New World, Hebrew origins of Native American languages, buried records, a Messiah visiting the Americas, two civilizations descending into warfare.

Gilbert Hunt’s The Late War (1816) and The First Book of Napoleon (1809) supply the King James cadence — “and it came to pass,” “curious workmanship,” “stripling” soldiers, fortifications, and n-gram matches identified by computer analysis.

Taken at a glance, the list is impressive. The impression is the argument. Once you ask the questions a court or a peer reviewer would ask about any charge of copying, the list stops functioning as evidence.

The Fork Jeremy Chose

Faced with a claim of literary dependency, an honest investigator has two roads.

The path Jeremy took: compile the longest possible list of thematic and phrase-level similarities, present the raw count, and let the reader infer that so many parallels could not be coincidence. This is the method biblical scholar Samuel Sandmel named parallelomania in 1962 — the extravagant piling-up of superficial likenesses until sheer volume masquerades as proof. It has one fatal property: it never tests itself against a control.

The path he skipped: ask the three questions that separate real borrowing from noise. First, are the parallels verbal (shared distinctive wording, the fingerprint of copying) or merely thematic (two books on the same subject inevitably touching the same topics)? Second, what is the base rate — when the same method is turned on other texts from the same King-James-imitating genre, texts nobody claims were copied, does it light up just the same? Third, does the alleged source contain the target’s distinctive features, or only its generic ones? Run those three tests and every version of the plagiarism theory collapses in the same direction.

The nuanced path is not the apologist’s special pleading. It is simply how literary dependency is established everywhere else — in copyright law, in classics, in New Testament source criticism. Jeremy applied the rigorous standard to nothing and the loose standard to the Book of Mormon. That is the fork.

The Church Was Not Hiding This

The CES Letter presents the View of the Hebrews parallels as something the Church buried. The published record says otherwise, and it says so long before the letter was written in 2013. LDS General Authority B. H. Roberts assembled the parallels himself in a candid study prepared for the First Presidency in 1921–1922; it circulated among scholars for decades and was published in full in 1985 as Studies of the Book of Mormon. Fawn Brodie pressed the same comparison in her critical 1945 biography No Man Knows My History. None of this was secret, and none of it is new.

Roberts’s own conclusion is routinely omitted by critics: he raised the parallels as a devil’s-advocate exercise to stress-test the argument, never renounced his testimony, and continued to defend the Book of Mormon publicly until his death. He wrote to probe, not to indict. The disclosure point therefore rests entirely on the pre-2013 published record — and on that record the Church has nothing to hide.

Shared Topic Is Not Shared Text

Both books argue that Native Americans descend from ancient Israel — a wildly popular thesis in 1820s America, advanced by dozens of writers. Given that shared premise, overlap in topic is not evidence of copying; it is unavoidable. Any two books arguing the Hebrew-origins theory must discuss migration, language, cultural decline, and lost records. Listing those overlaps proves no more than noting that two histories of the Civil War both mention Abraham Lincoln.

This is the verbal-versus-thematic test in action. Real plagiarism leaves verbal fingerprints — distinctive strings of shared wording. The View of the Hebrews case has almost none. Its parallels are thematic summaries (“both mention buried records”), not quotations. And the closer you look, the further apart the two books sit: Ethan Smith scatters his Israelites across the whole hemisphere; the Book of Mormon follows a single covenant lineage. He never mentions a golden book, a translator, a resurrected Christ walking among the people, or a unified thousand-year narrative. The themes rhyme because the subject is the same. The texts do not.

What Is Missing from the Alleged Source

View of the Hebrews is a compilation of newspaper clippings, sermons, and amateur ethnography — a polemical essay with no narrative, no characters, no plot, no dialogue, and no developed theology. The Book of Mormon is a 500-plus-page narrative spanning a thousand years, with named characters, interwoven story arcs, military and legal history, sustained sermons, and a coherent doctrinal system, dictated aloud in under three months.

Everything that makes the Book of Mormon distinctive is exactly what its supposed source lacks: covenant theology, the plan of salvation, the doctrine of an infinite Atonement worked out in Alma 34 and 2 Nephi 9, and the theology of grace and works in 2 Nephi 25:23. A plagiarist copies his source’s strengths. Joseph could not have copied these, because they are not in Ethan Smith’s book. The distinctive-features test fails for the plagiarism theory at every point that matters.

The Strongest Form of the Objection: The Late War

The View of the Hebrews parallels are soft. The strongest version of Jeremy’s case — and the one a doubter should take seriously — is The Late War, because it is not impressionistic but computational. In 2013, Chris and Duane Johnson ran an n-gram analysis against a corpus of roughly 100,000 digitized pre-1830 books and reported that Gilbert Hunt’s The Late War — a King-James-styled schoolbook history of the War of 1812 — produced the highest phrase-overlap score with the Book of Mormon (the 1816 first edition scored highest; an 1819 third-edition imprint scored second, about 25 percent lower). This deserves a real answer, not a wave of the hand.

Here the honest move is to concede what is real. Unlike View of the Hebrews, this is not a thematic case; it is a verbal-correspondence case, and it has to be answered on its own terms. The Johnsons did not merely count King James cadences and stop. Their 2013 procedure ran a rarity-weighting language model that downweighted the common, biblical phrasing every King-James pastiche shares — cadences like “it came to pass” — so that ordinary scriptural echoes counted for little and rarer wording counted for more. Weighted that way and measured against roughly 100,000 pre-1830 books, The Late War still rose to the single closest match to the Book of Mormon on rare shared four-word strings, with about 74 notable parallels. Dismissing that as “just KJV style” would be too quick, and no faithful reader should wave it away. The real answer is methodological — and it turns on whether that rarity weighting actually filtered the genre’s shared phrasing, or only discounted it.

First, the score is an artifact of corpus and normalization choices. The analysis ranks a text against whatever happened to be digitized in the search corpus, after stemming and a sliding four-word window that inflate the raw counts. The Late War rises toward the top not because its relationship to the Book of Mormon is unique but because so few book-length competitors of its kind sat in the corpus to compete with it.

Second, the base rate of pseudo-biblical Americana is enormous. An entire genre of early-1800s writing — The Late War, The First Book of Napoleon, the mock-scriptural “chronicle” pamphlets that circulated in the newspapers — poured King James grammar over American subjects. Any two texts drawn from that genre will share dozens upon dozens of the same rare four-word strings (“and it came to pass that,” “the face of the whole,” “it came to pass when”) that register as non-biblical only because the King James phrases the same idea a shade differently. In that genre rare is not the same as distinctive: the phrases are manufactured wholesale by a shared writing convention, not carried from one specific book into another.

Third, and decisively, real dependency transmits content — proper names, doctrine, narrative. The Late War transmits none of it. It shares no Nephi, no Alma, no Christ ministering in the Americas, no covenant theology, no thousand-year storyline — only register-level fragments. A candidate source that hands over the grammar of a period style yet not a single name, teaching, or plotline has not supplied the book; it has only breathed the same air.

And the honest tell is buried in the study itself. The Johnsons wrote plainly that they do not believe Joseph plagiarized from The Late War, only that it may have influenced some wording or ideas. The very researchers who produced Jeremy’s strongest data explicitly declined to draw Jeremy’s conclusion. He kept the numbers and dropped the authors’ verdict. That is the fork again, in miniature.

The One Genuinely Interesting Thread: Oliver Cowdery

One strand deserves to be treated as an open question rather than dismissed. Ethan Smith was pastor of the Congregational church in Poultney, Vermont, from 1821 to 1826, and Oliver Cowdery’s stepmother and half-sisters belonged to that congregation. Critics argue Oliver could have carried View of the Hebrews to Joseph. It is a fair thread to pull.

But it does not bear the weight placed on it. There is no evidence Oliver himself attended Ethan Smith’s church or ever read the book; LDS historian Larry Morris, reviewing the documents, concludes the supposed Cowdery–Ethan Smith association is not supported by the record. The chronology cuts hardest of all: Oliver did not meet Joseph until April 1829, and the bulk of the text was dictated in the roughly nine weeks that followed. For the Cowdery route to matter, a man who arrives after translation is already underway would have had to reshape a narrative around a book we cannot show he owned or read. The Poultney coincidence is real and mildly interesting; as a mechanism of composition it does not survive contact with the calendar.

Chiasmus: A Fingerprint the Sources Do Not Carry

Chiasmus is an ancient Hebraic structure in which ideas are stated and then mirrored in reverse (A–B–C–C′–B′–A′). Extended, deliberate chiasms saturate the Book of Mormon — the elaborate structure of Alma 36, identified by John Welch in 1967, turns on the redemption of Christ at its exact center. A defender of The Late War may point to a stray reversal or two in that book, but nothing in the proposed sources approaches the sustained, load-bearing complexity a translator would have had to design on purpose while dictating without notes.

The point is not merely presence or absence; it is intent and knowledge. Chiasmus as a formal feature of Hebrew scripture had only just begun to be identified by Western scholars in Joseph’s lifetime — John Jebb described it in 1820 and Thomas Boys in 1824–1825 — and those studies were published in England, not on the American frontier. A brief summary of Jebb’s work did reach print in Philadelphia in Thomas Hartwell Horne’s Introduction to the Critical Study of the Holy Scriptures (2nd ed., 1825), so the structure was not utterly unknown in America. But there is no evidence that specialized volume — or any developed treatment of chiasmus — reached Palmyra or Harmony, and none that Joseph, an unschooled farmer, ever encountered it. He had no demonstrable access to the structure and no source among the proposed texts that displayed it in developed form. You cannot copy from a book what the book does not contain. See Chiasmus and the Book of Mormon for the full analysis.

Stylometry: The Wrong Number of Authors for a Forgery

If Joseph fabricated the text from a handful of books, it should read as one author wearing costumes. Instead, stylometric studies — measuring the unconscious frequency of function words that no writer can hold constant on purpose — repeatedly find multiple distinct authorial voices inside the Book of Mormon, with figures such as Nephi, Mormon, Alma, and Moroni separating statistically from one another and from Joseph Smith’s own known writing. The field is genuinely contested — some analyses (Jockers and colleagues, 2008) have read the wordprint data toward other candidate authors, and no single study settles the question — but the recurring finding of multiple internal voices is difficult to reconcile with a lone forger. A single dictating forger does not easily produce that signature; a compilation of genuinely different authors does. See Stylometry — Multiple Authors, One Book.

This is the inverse of the Late War claim, and it is worth sitting with. The plagiarism argument needs one author borrowing from many books; the internal evidence points to many authors within one book. And how the text actually came into being — dictated aloud, with no manuscript or open books before the scribe — leaves no room for the cut-and-paste process the theory requires. See The Book of Mormon Translation Method.

Verdict

Resolved. The plagiarism theory fails the tests it was never subjected to. Against View of the Hebrews the parallels are thematic, not verbal — the expected residue of many books on one popular subject. The Late War is the harder case, and it is genuinely a verbal-correspondence case; but its high phrase-overlap score is a genre artifact — a limited digitized corpus, a whole family of King-James-pastiche Americana manufacturing the same rare four-word strings, and, decisively, not one shared proper name, doctrine, or storyline. The researchers who built that analysis refused to call it plagiarism. And the source texts lack precisely the Book of Mormon’s distinctive features — its narrative architecture, its worked-out theology, and its extended chiasmus. Nothing in View of the Hebrews, The Late War, or The First Book of Napoleon supplies what makes the Book of Mormon what it is.

Genuinely, and only mildly, open. Whether Joseph or Oliver ever laid eyes on View of the Hebrews cannot be proven either way, and the shared Israelite-origins atmosphere of the 1820s is a real part of the historical backdrop. A faithful reading has never needed to deny that Joseph lived in a world curious about ancient America. It needs only what the evidence actually shows: that curiosity is not a manuscript, atmosphere is not a source, and a list of parallels is not a case. Jeremy chose the list. The record rewards the reader who chose to weigh it.

Further Study