The 'no one could have written it' argument

Whether the Book of Mormon's speed, length and complexity put it beyond an 1829 farmer, so that divine origin wins by elimination.

What the Church claims

An unschooled 23-year-old could not have dictated a 269,000-word, internally complex scripture in about 65 working days with no notes and no revisions; every naturalistic explanation fails, so the book is what it claims to be.

Once the evidence is in, this claim: Weak. As a proof of divine origin the claim fails: it is an argument from incredulity resting on a truncated timeline and the wrong comparison class. It is not wholly dead only because no critic has reconstructed the composition in detail.

The record

  • Tad R. Callister's BYU devotional of 2016-11-01 (later chapter 2 of 'A Case for the Book of Mormon', 2019) calls Joseph a simple plowboy with little formal education, quotes Emma that he 'could neither write nor dictate a coherent and well-worded letter', says there was 'no outline, no three-by-five cards, nothing', and dismisses in turn Joseph, Cowdery, Rigdon, Spalding, View of the Hebrews, mental illness and creative genius as authors.
  • Scripture Central's evidence summary gives 269,510 words, 588 pages in the 1830 edition and about 60 working days, and asserts dictation 'without using any notes, outlines, reference materials, or substantive revisions' by a 23-year-old with 'no prior literary experience'.
  • Brian C. Hales (Interpreter 31, 2019) computes about 269,528 words over about 57 dictation days, roughly 4,700 words a day, lists 337 proper names (188 unique), 425+ geographical movements and 430 proposed chiasms, compares Joseph with Paolini, Tolkien, Shakespeare, Harper Lee and others, and concludes that as an author Joseph would be 'curiously unique'.
  • Joseph's own 1832 history, in his own handwriting, says he was 'mearly instructtid in reading and writing and the ground rules of Arithmatic'. The same document is a fluent, if unpolished, first-person narrative written three years after the dictation.
  • Lucy Mack Smith's 1845 history (p. 87) says that in family evening conversations, before Joseph had the plates, he gave 'amusing recitals' describing the ancient inhabitants of the continent: their dress, travel, animals, cities, buildings, warfare and worship.
  • William L. Davis (Dialogue 53:3, 2020) documents a close 19th-century parallel: Andrew Jackson Davis, aged 19-20 with about five months of schooling, dictated the roughly 320,000-word 'Principles of Nature' to a scribe while blindfolded in trance between November 1845 and January 1847, in a full-time equivalent of about 78.5 days, spelling out unfamiliar terms and resuming without review.
  • The illiterate Bosnian singer Avdo Medjedovic dictated a 12,323-line epic for Milman Parry in 1935 over about five days, as recorded by Albert Lord. Oral-formulaic composition by unlettered performers at book length is a documented human ability.
  • Hales himself concedes, in his Dialogue study of automatic writing, that Pearl Curran's 'The Sorry Tale' was dictated at a similar speed, that her scribes did not need to read back earlier text, and that book-length works have been produced with no research, outline or revision.

The moving target

  • 2016-11-01: The Book of Mormon must be either man-made or God-given; each man-made theory fails on the facts, and the doctrine and the witnesses confirm divine origin.
  • 2013-12: Joseph dictated the text in a short time by the gift and power of God using a seer stone or the interpreters; the essay makes the speed part of the case without claiming that no human could have done it.

The exchange

Tad R. Callister; Scripture Central

The elimination argument: Joseph was too unlearned, the time too short, the book too complex, and every proposed human author or source fails, so the divine account stands.

The answer: This is an argument from incredulity with a false dilemma built in. It treats the 57-65 days as the whole creative window, when Joseph had been describing ancient Americans to his family since about 1823 and had already dictated and lost a first draft in 1828. It also assumes that because nobody wrote a book this way in the believer's experience, nobody could; A. J. Davis and the oral-epic record show otherwise.

What they get right: Critics do not agree among themselves on how it was done, and several once-popular theories (Spalding, simple plagiarism from View of the Hebrews) really have failed. Callister is right that a naturalistic account owes a positive explanation, not just doubt.

Brian C. Hales, 'Curiously Unique', Interpreter 31 (2019)

Comparative authorship: measured against known young or first-time authors, Joseph's education, speed, length, complexity and no-revision method converge in a way no other author matches.

The answer: The comparison class is wrong. Hales compares an oral dictation with written novels, then finds the oral one anomalous. Compared with trance dictations and oral performance the book has close relatives, as Davis shows with A. J. Davis, and as Hales's own Pearl Curran data concede. A sufficiently long list of criteria makes any work unique; the uniqueness is produced by the checklist.

What they get right: No single comparator matches on every axis at once, and the 1829 text is more narratively intricate than A. J. Davis's philosophical work. 'Rare' is a fair description; 'impossible' is not.

Callister; Scripture Central KnoWhy 555 (2020-09-02)

Emma's and Lucy's testimony: those who knew him best said he could not have composed it; Lucy said he was the child least inclined to books.

The answer: Emma's statement was given fifty years later to her son in a setting designed to defend the faith, and it is contradicted by Joseph's surviving letters and 1832 history. Lucy's history is the very source that records his pre-1827 storytelling about ancient Americans; Scripture Central replies that Lucy placed those recitals in the context of angelic tutoring, which concedes the recitals happened.

What they get right: Lucy and Emma were sincere and consistent in their belief; neither ever described notes or collaborators.

Both cases at full strength

The skeptics' case

The argument works only by shrinking the evidence to the 57-65 days of final dictation and then asking whether a novice could improvise a book in that time. The documentary record is wider than that. Lucy Mack Smith describes Joseph narrating the dress, cities, warfare and worship of the ancient inhabitants years before he had plates; he dictated a first version of the opening in 1828, lost it, and had most of a year before Cowdery arrived; and the text he then produced is an oral text, dictated in the way preachers and storytellers of his world composed. Once the comparison class is oral performance rather than the modern novel, the feat has documented relatives: A. J. Davis's trance dictation of about 320,000 words at age 19-20 with months of schooling, Pearl Curran's dictated novels, and illiterate epic singers producing thousands of lines a day. The argument is also logically weak. Showing that theory A, B and C fail does not establish theory D; and 'I cannot imagine how he did it' is a statement about the speaker. Hales's own review of Davis concedes that Davis's account is groundbreaking in its detail. The honest conclusion is that the Book of Mormon is an unusual and impressive production, that its production is not fully reconstructed, and that neither of those facts is evidence of ancient origin.

The apologetic case

Believers are entitled to ask critics for a worked account, and for 190 years the accounts on offer kept collapsing: Spalding, Rigdon, Cowdery, epilepsy, plagiarism. The dictation witnesses, friendly and hostile, agree there were no notes and no books; the manuscript confirms dictation; the text holds together across hundreds of names, a reversed dictation order and nested flashbacks; and nothing else Joseph ever produced, before or after, is like it in scale. A. J. Davis's book is abstract philosophy, not a narrative with 200 characters, and nobody reads it today. On this view the natural explanation is possible in the abstract but has never been demonstrated in the concrete.

What would change this

A demonstration that the text contains verifiable ancient information unavailable in 1829 would make the speed argument secondary. Conversely, discovery of any pre-1829 notes or outline would end it. Absent either, a controlled showing that trained oral performers cannot sustain this kind of structure over 60 days would strengthen the apologetic case.

Sources

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