The Late War and pseudo-biblical sources

Whether KJV-imitating books of the 1810s, especially Gilbert Hunt's 1816 school text, were a direct source or merely the shared idiom.

What the Church claims

The Book of Mormon's scriptural style is unique and could not have been learned from contemporary imitations of the Bible.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Holds up. Direct borrowing from The Late War fails on method: the matches are common biblical idiom, not distinctive shared phrasing. The uniqueness half of the claim fares worse. Pseudo-biblical writing was a recognized genre with school-level examples in circulation, so the style was learnable, and that is what keeps the claim from being strong.

The record

  • Chris and Duane Johnson (2013) built a four-word-phrase (n-gram) comparison against a corpus of about 5,000 pre-1830 texts, weighted rare phrases more heavily, and reported 'The Late War Between the United States and Great Britain' (Gilbert Hunt, 1816), a school history written in King James style, as an unusually close match to the Book of Mormon.
  • Benjamin McGuire (Interpreter 7, 2013) found that 75 of the 549 claimed parallels (13.7%) came from the Book of Mormon's pre-printed copyright notice, that only 1.07% of The Late War's unique phrases appear in the Book of Mormon, that the Book of Mormon shares 12.33% of its phrases with the KJV against 4.57% for The Late War, and that n-grams crossing sentence boundaries produce phrases that do not exist as phrases.
  • McGuire concedes real overlap and that The Late War was 'deliberately modeled on the KJV'; FAIR concedes that both books use King James language as a stylistic choice and notes the copyright boilerplate problem.
  • FAIR reports that Dialogue declined the Johnsons' paper and that no peer-reviewed rejoinder to McGuire and Schaalje has appeared.
  • Stanford Carmack (Interpreter 28, 2018) compared the Book of Mormon with four pseudo-biblical texts (Leacock 1774-75, Snowden 1793, the 1809 Book of Napoleon, The Late War) on syntactic measures and found the Book of Mormon far from all of them: 24% adjacency of past-tense 'did' with the infinitive against under 1%, about 150 '-th' plurals, and personal 'which' at about 52%.
  • A Dialogue symposium (58:2, 2025) proposed a new candidate, Jane Porter's 1803 novel 'Thaddeus of Warsaw', held in the Manchester lending library, citing battle-scene parallels and the Smiths' naming of a stillborn son Thaddeus in 1831; a participant objected that parallels need statistical rarity, not affinity.

The moving target

The Church has never responded to The Late War, Thaddeus of Warsaw, or any of the 1810s source proposals. It has never named a source text for the Book of Mormon and has never conceded that Joseph read one. The entire exchange below takes place between independent scholars and independent apologists.

The exchange

Benjamin McGuire (Interpreter 2013); FAIR

The Late War study is parallelomania dressed as statistics: it counted boilerplate, ignored base rates, could not separate borrowing from a shared biblical register, and its own method 'found' an unknown Jane Austen source.

The answer: The methodological critique is largely correct, and skeptics should not present The Late War as a proven source. What survives is more modest and still important: in the 1810s and 1820s Americans were writing histories and satires in the exact idiom of the Book of Mormon, including 'it came to pass', numbered stripling soldiers, curious workmanship and fortifications of earth. The apologetic claim that the book's idiom was beyond a reader of such books is therefore false, whatever one thinks of direct borrowing.

What they get right: Specific 'rare phrase' matches (2,000 stripling soldiers, curious workmanship) are biblical or generic, as FAIR shows, and the copyright-notice matches were an embarrassing error.

Stanford Carmack (Interpreter 2018)

Syntactically the Book of Mormon does not look like the pseudo-biblical books at all; its archaic patterns exceed what an imitator of the KJV produces.

The answer: Carmack shows that the Book of Mormon is not a copy of these books, which no serious critic claimed. His measures also show that a text can be much more archaic than the KJV without being ancient; Davis (2025) argues the surplus archaism comes from Joseph's spiritual register and from Early Modern authors like Bunyan that rural families read.

What they get right: The Book of Mormon's syntax is genuinely unlike the pseudo-biblical genre on the measures Carmack chose.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The Johnsons' study is best treated as a discovery about genre, not source. It, and the older First Book of Napoleon comparison, show that the register in which the Book of Mormon speaks was a living 19th-century register, taught in schools and used for war history and satire. That undercuts the claim that no farmer could have produced scripture-sounding prose. It does not show that Joseph read Hunt, and the 2025 Thaddeus of Warsaw proposal shows how easily a well-read researcher can find affinities in any long period text. The strong form of the source claim should be dropped; the weak form is uncontroversial.

The apologetic case

The book's syntax is measurably unlike the pseudo-biblical genre; the flagship parallels dissolve on inspection; the method has not been published under review; and the same n-gram machinery turns up 'sources' for Jane Austen. Sharing a style with the 1810s proves only that the 1810s also imitated the Bible.

What would change this

A validated method with base-rate controls that still singles out The Late War; or, for the other side, evidence that Joseph never encountered pseudo-biblical prose.

Sources

An independent project. Not affiliated with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints or with any organization cited here. Summaries are written here; short quotations are attributed and linked. Every page names its sources so that it can be corrected, and every page can be challenged.