King James dependence: errors, italics, late Greek readings
The biblical material in the Book of Mormon follows the 1611-1769 King James text, including its mistakes and its late manuscript base.
What the Church claims
The Isaiah chapters and Jesus' sermon came from ancient plates independent of the King James Bible.
Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. The dependence is conceded; only its implication is debated, and the revealed-KJV theory is ad hoc.
The record
- David P. Wright (Dialogue 31:4, 1998) gives seven lines of evidence that Book of Mormon Isaiah derives directly from the KJV: reproduced wording, changes keyed to italicised words, preserved translation errors, and variants that work only in English.
- Stan Spencer (Interpreter 38, 2020) concedes the close dependence and that a disproportionate share of variants fall on KJV italics.
- BYU scholars Pike and Seely (2005) caution against the popular claim that 2 Nephi 12:16 preserves a lost ancient reading.
- Stan Larson (Trinity Journal 7, 1986) collected eight passages where the earliest Greek manuscripts of Matthew 5-7 differ from the late text behind the King James Version; in each one 3 Nephi follows the King James reading. 3 Nephi 13:13 includes the Matthew 6:13 doxology, absent from the earliest manuscripts.
- Mormon 9:22-24 follows the long ending of Mark.
- Roper's chart has no item for any of this.
The moving target
The Church has never addressed the King James wording, the italics or the late Greek readings directly. What it has moved on is the mechanism that would explain them. The 1981 introduction and a century of Church art present a translation read from the plates; the 2013 Gospel Topics essay on Book of Mormon translation says instead that Joseph dictated with a seer stone and that the words came in language familiar to Joseph. That shift makes room for the King James phrasing without ever naming it as a problem.
The exchange
Spencer (2020); Skousen and Carmack; Gardner
God or a prior translator rendered the text in familiar KJV language where meaning was close enough.
The answer: This explains wording, not content: a doxology and verses that were not in first-century Matthew are reproduced as Jesus' words, and mistranslations are carried into a supposedly independent Hebrew original. The theory is unfalsifiable and makes the 'translation' a revealed 17th-century English pastiche.
What they get right: Witnesses do describe dictation without a Bible, which is a genuine puzzle for a simple copying model.
Older FARMS literature
Some Book of Mormon variants agree with ancient versions (e.g. the Septuagint in 2 Nephi 12:16).
The answer: The flagship example is doubted by BYU's own Hebraists, and the variants overall cluster on italics, which exist only in English.
Both cases at full strength
The skeptics' case
This is the best-documented class of anachronism because it does not depend on the silence of archaeology. The text's biblical passages carry the fingerprints of a specific English edition and of the late Greek text behind it. Apologists have moved from denying dependence to explaining it, which concedes the datum.
The apologetic case
If God chose to give the translation in the scriptural idiom of its first readers, KJV wording is what we should expect, and small textual imprecisions do not affect doctrine.
What would change this
Demonstration that Book of Mormon biblical variants systematically match early manuscripts unknown in 1829 rather than KJV italics.
Closely related
- Deutero-Isaiah on the brass plates
- Christ in 3 Nephi: the sermon and the destruction
- KJV dependence, Deutero-Isaiah and Adam Clarke
Sources
- Anachronisms ... Chapter 7: Records, Writing, and Language
- Anachronisms ... Chapter 8: Events in Third Nephi
- Joseph Smith's Interpretation of Isaiah in the Book of Mormon
- 'Upon All the Ships of the Sea, and Upon All the Ships of Tarshish': Revisiting 2 Nephi 12:16 and Isaiah 2:16
- Missing Words: King James Bible Italics, the Translation of the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith as an Unlearned Reader
- The Sermon on the Mount: What Its Textual Transformation Discloses Concerning the Historicity of the Book of Mormon
- The Sermon on the Mount and the Book of Mormon
- Book of Mormon Overview: Anachronisms and What Isn't in the Book of Mormon
- Adam Clarke and Isaiah in the Book of Mormon
- Did Joseph Smith Use 19th-Century Scholarship for the Book of Mormon? (Mormon Stories 2002)
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