Translating and Printing the Book of Mormon

Skousen, Royal. "Translating and Printing the Book of Mormon." In Oliver Cowdery: Scribe, Elder, Witness., 2006.

Part 1: The Translation

 

 

Evidence from the Original Manuscript

In this section I discuss what the
original manuscript of the Book of Mormon tells us about how Joseph Smith
translated the Book of Mormon. Historical statements by witnesses of the
translation process also provide valuable information about how Joseph Smith
translated, but sometimes these statements are unreliable. In many respects,
the physical evidence from the original manuscript provides, as we shall see,
an important means of verifying historical statements.1

This physical evidence and the witness statements that it
confirms also shed light on the question of the authorship of the Book of
Mormon. They do not support theories that Joseph Smith composed the text
himself or that he took the text from some other source. Instead the physical
evidence and witness statements are most compatible with the account that
Joseph himself gave, that he translated the Book of Mormon “by the gift
and power of God.” 2

Witnesses of the translation process make two kinds of
claims. First of all, they provide valuable evidence of what they actually saw
taking place. Generally speaking, their actual observations are consistent with
the physical evidence in the original manuscript. On the other hand, these
witnesses frequently made claims about matters that they themselves could not
observe. For instance, some described what they believed Joseph Smith actually
saw in the interpreters; and many claimed that Joseph Smith could not go on
until the scribe had written down letter-for-letter what Joseph saw. It turns
out that these kinds of claims are not supported by the original manuscript. Of
course, the witnesses themselves did not see what Joseph saw. Here they were
either offering their own conjecture or perhaps recalling what Joseph might
have told them. Nonetheless, all seemed to believe that Joseph Smith actually
saw words in English, and there is evidence in the original manuscript to
support this idea.

This paper will not encompass a complete rehearsal of the
witnesses’ statements. Instead, I will provide, when needed, brief quotes from
the fuller statements, which can be found in a number of sources.3

Statements from Witnesses of the Translation

During the translation process, the witnesses were able to
observe, in an open setting, the following:

• Joseph
Smith placing the interpreters (either the Urim and Thummim or the seer stone)
in a hat and placing his face into the hat

• Joseph
Smith dictating for long periods of time without reference to any books,
papers, manuscripts, or even the plates themselves

• Joseph
Smith spelling out unfamiliar Book of Mormon names

• After
each dictated sequence, the scribe reading back to Joseph Smith what was
written so that Joseph could check the correctness of the manuscript

• Joseph
Smith starting a dictation session without prompting from the scribe about
where the previous session had ended

The translation process that these witnesses observed was an
open one—that is, others in the room could observe the dictation from
Joseph Smith to the scribe. But early on in the translation, from late 1827 to
early 1828, it appears that Joseph Smith used a different process while
translating. During this time Joseph first copied some of the characters
directly from the plates onto sheets of paper, from which sheets he would then
translate his transcribed characters into English by means of the Urim and
Thummim:

By this timely aid was I enabled to reach the place of my
destination in Pennsylvania, and immediately after my arrival there I commenced
copying the characters of the plates. I copyed a considerable
number of them and by means of the Urim and Thummim I translated some of them . . .4

In the above quote, the angled brackets < > surrounding all represent a crossout.

During this early period, the
plates were uncovered while Joseph Smith translated (or at least while he copied
the characters from the plates to paper); and since no one was permitted to see
the plates until later, Joseph took precautions to prevent anyone from seeing
him working directly with the plates. Martin Harris, in a couple of early
statements, said that a blanket or curtain separated Joseph Smith from him at
the time he (Harris) obtained a sample transcript and translation to take to
Professor Anthon in New York City.5

In place of this early method,
Joseph Smith soon turned to a method of translation that depended directly on
the interpreters alone, so that the plates did not have to be viewed, and thus
the translation could be done openly. All witnesses that refer to the
translation of the lost 116 pages and our current Book of Mormon text (Emma
Smith, Martin Harris, and members of the Whitmer family) openly observed this
translation process—one without a curtain or blanket separating Joseph
from his scribe. In fact, according to Emma Smith, the plates were wrapped up
and not directly used.6

On the basis of the witnesses’
statements, we can identify the following stages in the translation process:

1. Joseph
Smith sees (in some way) the English text,

2. Joseph
Smith reads off the text to the scribe,

3. the
scribe hears the text,

4. the
scribe writes the text.

Evidence from the original and printer’s manuscripts
suggests that the only revealed stage in the translation process was what
Joseph Smith himself saw by means of the interpreters. Witnesses seemed to have
believed that Joseph Smith actually saw an English text in the interpreters,
but it is possible that Joseph saw the text, so to speak, in his “mind’s
eye.” But in any event, all other stages—from Joseph Smith reading
off that text to the scribe’s writing it down—potentially introduced
human error and had to be carefully monitored.

There appear to be three possible
kinds of control over the dictation of the Book of Mormon text:

1. Loose
control:
 Ideas were revealed to Joseph Smith, and he put the ideas
into his own language (a theory advocated by many Book of Mormon scholars over
the years).

2. Tight
control:
 Joseph Smith saw specific words written out in English and
read them off to the scribe—the accuracy of the resulting text depending
on the carefulness of Joseph Smith and his scribe.

3. Iron-clad
control:
 Joseph Smith (or the interpreters themselves) would not
allow any error made by the scribe to remain (including the spelling of common
words).

One can also conceive of mixtures of these different
kinds of control. For instance, one might argue for tight control over the
spelling of specific names, but loose control over the English phraseology
itself.

A number of statements from the
witnesses definitely show that virtually all of them believed in the iron-clad
theory:

Joseph Knight (autograph
[between 1833 and 1847]):

But if it was not Spelt rite it
would not go away till it was rite, so we see it was marvelous.7

Emma Smith (Edmund C. Briggs interview, 1856):

When my husband was translating the
Book of Mormon, I wrote a part of it, as he dictated each sentence, word for
word, and when he came to proper names he could not pronounce, or long words,
he spelled them out, and while I was writing them, if I made a mistake in
spelling, he would stop me and correct my spelling, although it was impossible
for him to see how I was writing them down at the time.8

Martin Harris (Edward Stevenson’s 1881 account):

By aid of the seer stone, sentences
would appear and were read by the Prophet and written by Martin, and when
finished he would say, “Written,” and if correctly written, that
sentence would disappear and another appear in its place, but if not written
correctly it remained until corrected, so that the translation was just as it
was engraven on the plates, precisely in the language then used.9

David Whitmer (Eri B. Mullin interview, 1874):

. . . the words would appear, and if he
failed to spell the word right, it would stay till it was spelled right, then
pass away; another come, and so on.10

David Whitmer (James H. Hart interview, 1884):

Sometimes Joseph could not pronounce the words correctly,
having had but little education; and if by any means a mistake was made in the copy,
the luminous writing would remain until it was corrected. It sometimes took
Oliver several trials to get the right letters to spell correctly some of the
more difficult words, but when he had written them correctly, the characters
and the interpretation would disappear and the interpretation would disappear [a dittography?],
and be replaced by other characters and their interpretation.11

A similar example advocating
iron-clad control is the secondary witness of Samuel W. Richards (in a
statement recorded over fifty-eight years later, on 25 May 1907).12 According to Richards, Oliver Cowdery explained to him during the winter of
1848–49 how Joseph Smith had translated:

1. Every
word was distinctly visible even down to every letter;

2. and
if Oliver omitted a word or failed to spell a word correctly, the translation
remained on the “interpreter” until it was copied correctly.

As we shall see, the first statement is apparently
true, but the second one is definitely false.

Evidence in the Manuscripts

We now turn to the original manuscript and what it can
specifically tell us about the translation process. In a number of instances,
it provides valuable support (or at least consistent evidence) for some events
that witnesses actually saw. This manuscript also provides valuable evidence
for procedures that none of the witnesses described in any of their statements.

The Original Manuscript Was Written from Dictation

Errors in the original manuscript (O) are based on the
scribe mishearing what Joseph Smith dictated rather than visually misreading
while copying from another manuscript. Consider, for instance, the difficulty
the scribe had in hearing the difference between and and an. In 1 Nephi
13:29 of O the scribe (designated as scribe 2) wrote down the following:

& because of these things which
are taken away out of the gosple of the Lamb & exceeding great many do
stumble

Obviously, scribe 2 misheard “an exceeding great
many” as “and exceeding great many”. The use of the ampersand
(&) shows that the error was not based on visual similarity. Hearing an, the scribe interpreted it as the casual speech form an’ for and.

A mishearing could also occur when the actual word was
rather infrequent and the scribe replaced it with a more frequent but
phonetically similar word, as in the following example from 1 Nephi
17:48 of O, when Oliver Cowdery wrote weed rather than reed:

& whoso shall lay their hands
upon me shall wither even as a dried weed

In this example, as well as in the previous one, the
scribe of the original manuscript did not catch the error.

In the following example Oliver Cowdery immediately
corrected a misheard word in Alma 57:22 of O. The incorrect meet is crossed out (angled brackets are used to represent crossouts) and the
correct beat is inserted above the crossout (as indicated by the caret):

for it was they who did beat/ the Lamanites

One particular difficulty for the scribe occurred whenever
Joseph Smith pronounced unstressed ’em (for either them or him).
In the following two examples, Oliver Cowdery first interpreted ’em as him, then immediately corrected it by writing them:

& behold they saw him < a >
comeing & they hailed him but he sayeth unto them fear not
(Alma 55:8)

wherefore Akish administered it
unto his kindreds & friends leading {<%him%>|them} away by fair
promises (Ether 8:17)

In the first instance, Oliver Cowdery simply crossed
out the him and wrote the correct them immediately afterwards on the same line. In the
second case, Oliver erased the incorrect him (represented as
<%him%>) and then overwrote the erasure with them (the percent
sign with angled brackets stands for erasure; curly brackets are used to
represent overwriting). Both examples show the problems Oliver was having in
interpreting the unstressed ’em of Joseph Smith’s dictation.

Sometimes a following word, when read aloud, interfered with
the scribe’s ability to hear the correct reading. For instance, in Alma 41:14
Oliver Cowdery wrote Sons instead of Son in O (he later corrected the
error in the printer’s manuscript [P]). In this example, underlining is used to
highlight the textual change:

therefore my Sons see that ye are merciful unto your Brethren (O) > Son (P)

The source of this error is the following word see, whose initial s would have made it hard for Oliver Cowdery to hear
any difference between son see and sons see. This passage comes from
Alma’s discourse to his son Corianton; he is speaking to only one son. In other
places in this passage (listed below) son is correctly transcribed in
both O and P because the context does not lead to ambiguity; in these cases son is immediately followed by either a vowel or a consonant other than s:

now my Son I do not say that their
resurrection cometh at the resurrection of Christ (Alma 40:20)

& now my Son this is the
restoration of which has been spoken (Alma 40:24)

& now my Son I have somewhat to
say concerning the restoration (Alma 41:1)

I say unto thee my Son that the
plan of restoration is requisite with the Justice of God (Alma 41:2)

& now behold my Son do not risk
one more offence against your God (Alma 41:9)

& now my Son all men that are
in a state of Nature . . . (Alma 41:11)

& now my Son I perceive there is somewhat more which
doth worry your mind (Alma 42:1)

now
behold my son I will explain this thing unto thee (Alma 42:2)

& now remember my Son if it
were not for the plan of redemption . . . (Alma 42:11)

In Alma 41:13 (“O my Son this is not the case”),
the text is not fully extant to show whether Son or Sons was in O; P definitely
has Son.

In contrast to these examples from O, the errors that are
found in P show that it was visually copied. We have examples where Oliver
Cowdery incorrectly read O when copying it to produce P. In each case, the
error leads to a more difficult reading. As before, underlining is used to
indicate the textual change.

yea & I always knew that there was a God (O) > also (P) (Alma 30:52)

&
Parhoran retained the Judgment seat which caused much rejoiceing among the
Brethren of Parhoran & also among the People of liberty (O) > many (P*) > many of (Pjg, 1830) (Alma
51:7)

[The correct spelling of the name should be Parhoron; the first four occurrences of this name in O were spelled Parhoron (Alma 50:40, 52:2–3), not Pahoran (as it appears in the
current text) or Parhoran (as shown above in Alma 51:7); the symbol P* refers to the original hand in P, while Pjg refers to a correction (in
the printer’s manuscript) made by John Gilbert, the compositor for the 1830
edition.]

and he also saw other multitudes pr*ssing their way towards that great and specious bilding (O)
feeling (P) (1 Nephi
8:31)

All of these errors are due to visual similarity. In
the first two examples Oliver Cowdery miscopied his own hand in O. In the
second example, Oliver wrote “many the People of liberty” in P, which
made no sense, so the 1830 compositor, John Gilbert (whose marks are designated
here by Pjg),
inserted the of to improve the reading. And in the last example,
the hand in O is scribe 3’s. This scribe’s open p has a high
ascender, which makes his p look like an f. The e vowel is missing.
And the first s in pressing was an elongated s (represented as *s in the above transcription), which Oliver
interpreted as an l.

Immediate corrections in the printer’s manuscript also show
the influence of visual similarity in producing P. Here I list some of the
clear examples found in P that show an incorrect word crossed out and the
correct visually similar word from O inserted or written immediately
afterwards:

satisfied/ (Mosiah 15:9)

declare (Mosiah 27:37)

caused/ (Alma 8:13)

sacrifice/ (Alma 34:10)

provisions/ (Alma 56:27) 
[This same correction is
also found in Alma 57:11 and 57:15.]

^ suffer/ (Alma 58:22)

cease/ (Helaman 4:25)

buried/ (3 Nephi 8:25)

rearward/ (3 Nephi 20:42)

Joseph Smith Was Working with at Least Twenty 
to Thirty Words at a Time

There is some evidence in the original manuscript for the
minimal amount of text Joseph Smith had access to as he was dictating.
Consider, first of all, the evidence from scribal anticipations. Frequently the
scribe, in attempting to keep up with Joseph’s dictation, jumped ahead of the
actual text. As an example, we have the following case of Oliver Cowdery
anticipating the text in Alma 56:41 of O:

& it came to pass that again
when the light of the morning came we saw the
Lamanites upon us

This example suggests that Joseph and Oliver started
out together, but by the time Oliver finished writing “& it came to
pass that again” Joseph had moved along far enough that he was then
dictating “we saw the Lamanites upon us” and Oliver started to write
that down when he realized he had skipped the intervening text “when the
light of the morning came,” so he immediately crossed out “we saw the
Lamanites” and wrote the correct sequence, possibly with Joseph repeating
the correct text for him. If this explanation is correct, then it indicates
that Joseph Smith had at least twenty words in view as he was dictating.

It is also possible that this error was produced by Joseph
Smith as he was dictating; that is, Joseph himself may have accidentally
skipped the phrase “when the light of the morning came” and then
corrected himself. In either case, the implication remains that Joseph had
access to at least twenty words.

Another kind of evidence for the length of dictation can be
seen in a change of scribe found in Alma 45:22 of O; Oliver Cowdery (OC)
suddenly stops acting as scribe and Joseph Smith (JS) himself takes over the
scribe’s task for twenty-eight words:

OC: . . .
therefore Helaman & his Brethren went forth to establish the church again
in all the land

JS: yea in every citty throughout
all the land which was possessed by the people of Nephi and it came to pass
that they did appoint priests and teachers

OC: throughout all the land over all the churches . . .

These twenty-eight words in Joseph Smith’s hand are
written very carefully. And except for one spelling variant (citty),
all the extant words are spelled according to standard orthography.

One possible explanation for this momentary switch in
scribes is that it represents Oliver Cowdery’s unsuccessful attempt to
translate. It even suggests that Oliver, like Peter the apostle walking on the
water, succeeded at first. For instance, verse 5 of section 9 in the Doctrine
and Covenants implies an initial success on Oliver’s part:

And, behold, it is because that you did not continue as you
commenced, when you began to translate, that I have taken away this privilege
from you.

Nonetheless, there is, in my opinion, some difficulty with
the suggestion that these twenty-eight words in Alma 45 represent Oliver
Cowdery translating. One problem is that the switch to Joseph Smith’s hand
occurs in the middle of the narrative, in fact, in the middle of a sentence
(although at a point of semiclosure). One would think that Oliver Cowdery’s
attempt to translate would have come at a more suitable break in the narrative.

My explanation for this scribal switch is that there was a
sudden need for the scribe to break off and Joseph Smith had to get down what
he was currently viewing in the interpreters, so he wrote it down himself. The
reason Joseph would have had to do this is possibly explained by Emma Smith’s claim
in her 1879 interview with her son Joseph Smith III that his father, Joseph
Smith Jr., started dictation sessions without prompting:

I am satisfied that no man could have dictated the writing
of the manuscripts unless he was inspired; for, when acting as his scribe, your
father would dictate to me hour after hour; and when returning after meals, or
after interruptions, he would at once begin where he had left off, without
either seeing the manuscript or having any portion of it read to him. This was
a usual thing for him to do. It would have been improbable that a learned man
could do this; and, for one so ignorant and unlearned as he was, it was simply
impossible.13

This ability to continue without prompting suggests
that before ending a dictation session or going on to the next portion of text,
Joseph Smith would have to finish getting copied down all of what he was
viewing; otherwise the uncopied part would be lost. In other words, Joseph had
to deal with what was in front of him and could not quit until what he was
seeing was transcribed.

Joseph’s careful handwriting for these twenty-eight words as
well as his accurate spelling for several difficult words (throughout,
possessed, appoint
) suggests that he might have been visually
copying and not listening to someone else dictating the text (unless that
person was also spelling out English words for Joseph). In other early
holographic writings of Joseph Smith, we find numerous examples suggesting that
Joseph was not a particularly good speller. Yet in those writings he does
consistently spell through correctly. In documents dating from 1832,
1833, and 1839, he writes only through, so the correct spelling
of throughout in Alma 45 may simply be due to the fact that Joseph already knew how to spell
this word.14 Early on, in 1833, Joseph Smith spelled possess as posess, with a single s in the middle of the word. Yet later, in 1840, he
had apparently learned how to spell possession correctly, with two s‘s
instead of one.15 And an 1832 spelling of appointed is also
correctly written by Joseph Smith.16 So ultimately this brief
passage in Alma 45 has too few words in Joseph Smith’s hand to demonstrate that
he was visually copying from an orthographically correct text. In a cursory
examination, I have found only one holographic writing of Joseph’s that
contains an incorrect spelling (that is, posess) for one of the three
potentially difficult words in this short passage. And of course, we must
remember that Joseph did misspell city as citty in
this passage from Alma 45. So the spelling evidence is not conclusive.

Still, if this explanation is right (that the generally
correct spelling of the text in Joseph Smith’s hand here in the original
manuscript suggests visual copying), then Joseph Smith was viewing at least
these twenty-eight words.

Joseph Smith Could See the Spelling of Names

Several witnesses to the
translation process claimed that Joseph Smith sometimes spelled out names to
the scribe. And we find evidence in the original manuscript in support of this
process. Frequently the first occurrence of a Book of Mormon name is first
spelled phonetically, then that spelling is corrected; in some instances, the incorrect
spelling is crossed out and followed on the same line by the correct spelling,
thus indicating that the correction is an immediate one. For example, in Alma
33:15 the text of O reads as follows:

for it is not written that Zenos alone spake of these things
but Zenoch also spake of these things

Oliver Cowdery first wrote Zenock using the
expected ck English spelling for the k sound when preceded by a short vowel. But then
Oliver crossed out the whole word and immediately afterwards, on the same line,
wrote Zenoch, thus indicating that the spelling agrees with the biblical name Enoch. This example also suggests that Joseph Smith spelled out the ch sequence for Oliver Cowdery, although it is possible that Joseph could have
repronounced the ch sequence with the incorrect ch sound rather than with the correct k sound in order to help Oliver
get it down right.

But there are also examples for which it is impossible to
find a repronunciation that will guarantee the correct spelling. For instance,
in Helaman 1:15 Oliver Cowdery first wrote the name Coriantumr phonetically, as Coriantummer, then he crossed it all out and wrote out
the correct spelling, Coriantumr:

& they were lead by a man whose name was
Coriantumr

In this case, no matter how slowly or carefully Joseph
Smith might have repronounced Coriantumr, it would have been
impossible for him to have indicated that there was no vowel between the m and r at the end of the name except by actually spelling out the separate letters m and r. Nor could Oliver Cowdery have guessed this spelling since no word (or name) in
English ends in mr. In fact, Oliver ends the correct spelling Coriantumr with a large flourish on the final r, which Oliver produces nowhere
else in either the original or the printer’s manuscript. This addition probably
reveals Oliver Cowdery’s frustration at having to guess at such a weird
spelling.17

Emma Smith and David Whitmer claimed that Joseph Smith
sometimes spelled out, in addition to names, English words that were difficult
to pronounce:

Emma Smith (Edmund C. Briggs
interview, 1856):

When my husband was translating the Book of Mormon, I wrote
a part of it, as he dictated each sentence, word for word, and when he came to
proper names he could not pronounce, or long words, he spelled them out . . .18

David Whitmer (Chicago Tribune interview, 1885):

In translating the characters
Smith, who was illiterate and but little versed in Biblical lore, was
ofttimes compelled to spell the words out, not knowing the correct
pronunciation . . .19

There appears to be no firm evidence in what remains of
the original manuscript to support this claim of Emma Smith and David
Whitmer. Long English words found in what remains of the original manuscript
are frequently misspelled, as in the following sampling from 1 Nephi
(where misspelled letters are underlined):

Oliver
Cowdery:

2:3

obediant

2:11

immagionations

4:20

treasurey (3 times)

16:19

fateagued

17:30

expediant

17:51

miricles

19:10

espesially

Scribe
2:

3:16

inheritence

13:5

tortereth

13:23

covanants (2 times)

15:20

passified

Scribe
3:

4:20

treashury

4:34

dilligent

4:36

desirus

5:2

inherritance

5:8

surity (2 times)

5:9

sacrafice

5:13

prophasies

5:14

jenealeja

5:14

desendant

6:2

sofiseth

7:1

fammaly

7:8

exampel

7:12

exersise

8:21

concorses

10:2

dilagence

10:4

masiah

11:6

hosana

11:26

condesension

11:34

apostels

12:4

tumultius

Of all these examples, only the spelling for genealogy lends support to the idea that Joseph Smith spelled out English words. Scribe 3’s
spelling jenealeja for genealogy definitely suggests some difficulty in dealing with this word. In 1 Nephi we
have the following spellings for genealogy in the original manuscript:

 

 

Reference

Scribe

Spelling

3:3

Oliver
Cowdery

genealogy

3:12

scribe
2

genealogy

5:14

scribe
3

jenealeja

5:16

scribe
3

genealogy

6:1

scribe
3

genealogy

19:2

Oliver
Cowdery

genealogy

 

 

The fact that both Oliver Cowdery and scribe 2 were
readily able to spell genealogy correctly suggests that they had no
difficulty in dealing with this word, nor did Joseph Smith in pronouncing it.
But the first time scribe 3 tries to spell genealogy (in 1 Nephi
5:14), he writes jenealeja, a very naive spelling. This scribe’s use of j in place of g suggests that he had no idea how to spell this word—and perhaps he didn’t
recognize or even know the word. But a short time later, when the word is used
in verse 16, it suddenly appears in its standard spelling (as also in 6:1).
This sudden change implies that someone—possibly Joseph Smith—could
have told scribe 3 how to spell this word.

In any event, if Joseph Smith did
spell out long English words, it appears to have been fairly infrequent. The
lack of consistent evidence for spelling out words of English does not,
however, necessarily contradict Emma Smith’s statement. Emma’s description
refers to when she was acting as scribe, which presumably would have been at
the beginning of the original book of Lehi (which formed part of the 116
manuscript pages that were later lost). Joseph Smith’s pronunciation of long
English words might have improved sufficiently as the 116 pages were being
dictated that eventually he hardly ever needed to spell out difficult English
words. Even in the beginning there probably wouldn’t have been that many words
causing him difficulty. Having learned how to pronounce the difficult words, he
would have simply relied on the scribe to correctly spell the words he dictated,
except for unfamiliar names.

The original manuscript suggests
that the spelling of names could have been checked whenever the scribe felt
unsure of the spelling. This situation would naturally occur with the first
occurrence of an unfamiliar name in the text. (It could also occur after a
substantial hiatus, during which the scribe might have forgotten the spelling.)
As an extended example of this phenomenon, consider the spelling of Amalickiah in the book of Alma. The first couple of occurrences are spelled correctly, but
then Oliver Cowdery (the scribe here) starts spelling the second and third
vowels of Amalickiah as e‘s.
At first Oliver catches these errors and corrects them. But eventually he
apparently remembers that once the scribe has made sure that the first
occurrence of a name is spelled correctly, there is really no need to worry
about spelling variance in subsequent occurrences of the name. In this case,
the first spelling Amalickiah establishes the correct spelling. As long
as this is kept in mind, there is no problem if subsequent occurrences of Amalickiah are spelled differently. So after the first handful of occurrences, Oliver
rather consistently spells Amalickiah as Ameleckiah, although sometimes he
immediately corrects the second e to an i; or sometimes he later corrects the first e to an a (always with a heavier ink flow).

In
the following list, we have all the occurrences of Amalickiah and in order of
appearance. Correct spellings are marked with an asterisk (*); some examples
are not fully extant in O and are represented by a question mark (?); an e corrected to an a is written as {e|a}; a
plus sign (+) means that the change of e to a was done in heavier ink; {e|i} stands for an e corrected to an i; and finally,
parentheses containing blank spaces means that the text here is not extant:

correct spelling, without
overwriting:

* 46:3 Amalickiah

* 46:4 Amalickiah

overwriting of e‘s
begins:

*+ 46:5 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

*+ 46:6 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

? 46:7 —

overwriting suddenly ends; e‘s
not corrected at all:

46:10 Ameleckiah

46:11 Amelickiah

? 46:28 —

46:28 Ameleckiahites

? 46:29 —

? 46:29 —

46:30 Amaleckiah

46:30 Ameleckiah

46:30 Ameleckiah

46:31 Ameleckiah

? 46:32 —

46:33 Ameleckiah

46:35 Ameleckiahites

47:1 Amaleckiah

overwriting briefly returns
with some consistency:

+ ? 47:3 Am{e|a}( )ckiah

*+ 47:4 Am{e|a}lickiah

*+ 47:8 Am{e|a}lickiahs

*+ heading Am{e|a}lickiah

*+ 47:11 Am{e|a}lickiah

? 47:12 —

+ 47:13 Am{e|a}leckiah

*+ 47:13 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

overwriting becomes fairly
inconsistent:

+ 47:13 Am{e|a}leckiah

47:14 Amel{e|i}ckiah

47:15 Amel{e|i}ckiah

* 47:15 Amal{e|i}ckiah

47:16 Ameleckiah

47:18 Ameleckiah

*+ 47:19 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

47:20 Amel{e|i}ckiah

overwriting becomes quite
sporadic and infrequent:

47:21 Amelickiah

47:21 Ameleckiah

47:22 Amel{e|i}ckiah

47:25 Ameleckiah

47:27 Ameleckiah

? 47:27 —

47:30 Ameleckiah

47:32 Amel{e|i}ckiah

47:33 Ameleckiah

47:34 Ameleckiah

47:35 Amaleckiah

heading Amel{e|i}ckiah

48:1 Ameleckiah

+ 48:7 Am{e|a}leckiah

49:9 Amel{e|i}ckiahites

*+ 49:10 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

? 49:11 —

49:25 Amel{e|i}ckiah

? 51:9 —

? 51:11 —

? 51:12 —

heading Ameleckiah

+ 51:23 Am{e|a}leckiah

51:23 Amelickiah

*+ 51:25 Am{e|a}l{e|i}ckiah

51:27 Amelickiah

51:30 Amelickiah

51:32 Ameleckiah

51:33 Ameleckiah

? 51:37 ( )el( )

52:1 Ameleckiah

*+ 52:3 Am{e|a}lickiah

52:3 Ameleckiah

heading Ameleckiah

54:16 Amelickiah

55:5 Ameleckiah

? 62:35 —

Quite obviously, the scribe can make errors. There is
definitely no iron-clad control over the text.

The spelling Ameleckiah also provides evidence
that Joseph Smith was pronouncing this name with stress on the first syllable,
with the result that the second and third vowels were reduced to the indistinct
schwa vowel (“uh”). If Joseph Smith had been pronouncing Amalickiah as we do currently, with stress on the second syllable, then Oliver Cowdery
would have consistently and correctly spelled at least the second vowel.

Most of the witnesses believed that Joseph Smith or the
interpreters had some ability to know what the scribe was writing. They may
well have occasionally observed Joseph Smith correcting the scribe without directly
looking at the manuscript. Yet this interference was not automatic, nor did it
prevent the scribe from making mistakes.

The Scribe Repeated Back the Text to Joseph Smith

According to David Whitmer (as found in his own 1887
publication An
Address to All Believers in Christ
), a dictation of words was
followed by a checking sequence in which the scribe would read back the text to
Joseph Smith. If an error was discovered, Joseph Smith would presumably then
read off the correct text once more until he was satisfied that the scribe had
written it down correctly:

Brother Joseph would read off the
English to Oliver Cowdery, who was his principal scribe, and when it was written
down and repeated to Brother Joseph to see if it was correct, then it would
disappear, and another character with the interpretation would appear.20

David Whitmer also referred to this repetition in an
1881 interview published in the Kansas City Journal:

He did not use the plates in the translation, but would hold
the interpreters to his eyes and cover his face with a hat, excluding all
light, and before his eyes would appear what seemed to be parchment, on which
would appear the characters of the plates in a line at the top, and immediately
below would appear the translation in English, which Smith would read to his
scribe, who wrote it down exactly as it fell from his lips. The scribe would
then read the sentence written, and if any mistake had been made, the
characters would remain visible to Smith until corrected, when they faded from
sight, to be replaced by another line.21

The specific evidence from the original manuscript is
consistent with the claim that the scribe read back what had been written. In
such a process, Joseph Smith would be checking what he was hearing from the
scribe against what he was viewing in the interpreters. But such agreement
would not guarantee the accuracy of the manuscript. For instance, Amalickiah could be spelled Ameleckiah, but since both spellings were pronounced the
same (when stress was on the first syllable), there would be no way for Joseph
to detect the incorrect spelling when the scribe pronounced the name. This same
difficulty applies to phonetically similar words (such as mixing up weed with reed, and with an, and sons with son when immediately followed by a word beginning with an s).
Most of the undetected errors that remain in the original manuscript could not
have been caught when read back because there was little if any difference in
pronunciation.

Corrections in the original manuscript are also consistent
with a repetition sequence. The clear majority of changes in the original
manuscript were made immediately; that is, the scribe caught the error during
Joseph Smith’s initial dictation. Evidence for these immediate corrections
include: corrections following on the same line, erasures showing ink smearing
(since the ink had not yet dried), or supralinear corrections or insertions in
the line with no change in the level of ink flow or difference in the quill.
These immediate corrections also include numerous cases where the crossed-out
word is only part of the intended word or is obviously miswritten.

On the other hand, there are also numerous changes that are
consistent with a process of correcting errors found while repeating the text.
In these instances, the original form is complete and the error is usually not
obvious (that is, the reading is not a difficult reading); the correction is
supralinear or inserted in the line, but there is no erasure, only a crossout
of the error, and the level of ink flow for the correction is usually
different.

We should also note that there is evidence that some
corrections were done considerably later, that is, some time after the
repetition sequence. In fact, a few of these later corrections in the original
manuscript were apparently made when the printer’s manuscript was being copied
from the original or even later when sheets of the 1830 edition were being
proofed. Sometimes the change was by a different scribe or in a different
medium (such as pencil). In virtually every case these few corrections
eliminated difficult readings in the original manuscript.

The Word Chapter and the Corresponding
Chapter Numbers 
Were Not Part of the Revealed Text

Evidence from both the original and printer’s manuscripts
shows that Joseph Smith apparently saw some visual indication at the end of a
section that the section was ending. Although this may have been a symbol of
some kind, a more likely possibility is that the last words of the section were
followed by blankness. Recognizing that the section was ending, Joseph Smith
then told the scribe to write the word chapter, with the understanding
that the appropriate number would be added later.

There is considerable evidence in both manuscripts to
support this interpretation. First, the word chapter is never used by any
writer in the text itself, unlike the term book, which is used to refer to
an individual book in the Book of Mormon (such as the book of Helaman) as well
as a whole set of plates (such as the book of Nephi, meaning the large plates
of Nephi; see Helaman 2:13–14).

Second, chapters are assigned before the beginning of a
book. For instance, in the original manuscript, we have the following at the
beginning of 2 Nephi:

 

VIII>

 

 

second Chapter I
The ^ Book of Nephi
^ An account of the death of Lehi . . .

Oliver Cowdery first wrote Chapter at the
conclusion of the last section in 1 Nephi—that is, at the conclusion of Chapter VII in
the original chapter system; our current chapter system dates from Orson Pratt’s
1879 edition of the Book of Mormon (which has 22 chapters in 1 Nephi). At this
point, Joseph Smith had no indication that a new book was beginning. All he
could see was the end of Chapter VII (namely, the words “and thus it is
Amen” followed probably by blankness or maybe a special symbol). Later,
when Oliver Cowdery was adding the chapter numbers, he first assigned the Roman
numeral VIII to this first chapter of 2 Nephi. But when he realized that this was actually the
beginning of a new book, he crossed out the whole chapter designation and
inserted (with slightly weaker ink flow) “Chapter I” after the title
of the book, which originally was simply designated as “The Book of Nephi.”
Later he realized that there was more than one book of Nephi, which led him to
also insert the word second (with considerably heavier ink flow).

This system of assigning chapters also explains why the two manuscripts
have chapter numbers assigned to the short books found at the end of the small
plates (Enos, Jarom, Omni, and the Words of Mormon) as well as 4 Nephi. These
books contain only one section, but at the beginning of each of these short
books, Joseph Smith apparently had no knowledge that this was the case. This
fact further shows that Joseph Smith himself did not know in advance the
contents or structure of the text.

Probably the strongest evidence that the word chapter is not original to the revealed text is that the chapter numbers are assigned
later in both manuscripts. The numbers are almost always written in heavier ink
and more carefully. In many cases, Oliver Cowdery added serifs to his Roman
numerals. On the other hand, his Chapter is always written rapidly
and with the same general ink flow as the surrounding text. In the printer’s
manuscript, at the beginning of Chapter XVII in Alma (now the beginning of Alma
36), the Roman numeral XVII was written in blue ink, not the normal black
ink. In this part of the printer’s manuscript, Oliver had been using this same
blue ink to rule the manuscript sheets of P prior to copying. Here he also used
this blue ink to assign the chapter number as well as add an s to the word Commandment in the next line. This example clearly suggests that this part of the original
manuscript itself did not yet have chapter numbers assigned to it when Oliver
Cowdery started to copy it, perhaps six months after it had been dictated.

In addition, there is one case when the scribe got off in
his counting of the chapters. While producing the printer’s manuscript, when he
came to Chapter VIII in Mosiah (now starting at chapter 13, verse 25), Oliver
Cowdery accidentally assigned the Roman numeral IX to this chapter,
with the result that all the numbers for the subsequent chapters in Mosiah are
off by one. The compositor for the 1830 edition caught this error and penciled
in the correct number for all but one of these later chapters.

Internal Evidence for Tight Control

The evidence for loose control seems to rely heavily upon
the notion that the nonstandard use of English in the original text could not
have come from the Lord (since he supposedly only speaks “correct”
English). The use of dialectal English, in this view, is said to be Joseph
Smith’s contribution; thus by inference the Lord only gave Joseph Smith ideas,
not specific words.22 Of course, the spelling out of names
definitely suggests that a theory of loose control must be revised in some way;
Joseph Smith had some view of the specific spelling for names, in particular,
names with impossible spellings for English literates.

In addition, there is substantial evidence within the text
itself for tight control over specific words, phrases, and sentences of
English. For instance, John W. Welch has pointed out an interesting case where
the Book of Mormon makes the same identical (nonbiblical) quote in widely
separated parts of the text.23 The example he gives is based on Lehi’s
vision of the kingdom of God as found in 1 Nephi 1:8 and Alma 36:22:

and he thought he saw
God sitting upon his throne
surrounded with numberless
concourses of angels

in the attitude of singing and
praising their God 

(1 Nephi 1:8)

and methought I saw
even as our father Lehi saw
God sitting upon his throne
surrounded with numberless
concourses of angels

in the attitude of singing and
praising their God

(Alma 36:22)

This identity of quotation provides striking support
for a theory of tight control over the translation.

One of the interesting complexities of the original
English-language text of the Book of Mormon is that it contains expressions
that appear to be uncharacteristic of English in all of its dialects and
historical stages. These structures also support the notion that Joseph Smith’s
translation is a literal one and not simply a reflection of either his own
dialect or the style of early modern English found in the King James Version of
the Bible.

For instance, in the original text of the Book of Mormon we
find a number of occurrences of a Hebrew-like conditional clause. In English,
we have conditional clauses like “if you come, then I will come,”
with then being optional. In Hebrew this same clause is expressed as “if you come
and I will come.” In the original text of the Book of Mormon, there were
at least fourteen occurrences of this non-English expression. One occurrence
was removed in 1 Nephi
17:50 as Oliver Cowdery was producing the printer’s manuscript by copying from
the original manuscript:

if he should command me that I
should say unto this water be thou earth and
it shall be earth
 (O) > it should
be earth
 (P)

The remaining thirteen occurrences were all removed by
Joseph Smith in his editing for the second edition of the Book of Mormon,
published in 1837 in Kirtland, Ohio. One example comes from the famous passage
in Moroni 10:4:

and if ye shall ask with a sincere
heart with real intent having faith in Christ and he will manifest the truth of it unto you by the power of the Holy Ghost (P,
1830) > NULL (1837)

This use of and is not due to scribal error,
especially since this if-and expression occurs seven times in one brief
passage (Helaman 12:13–21):

13 yea
and if he sayeth unto the earth move and it is moved

14 yea if he say unto the earth thou shalt
go back that it lengthen out the day for many hours and it is done . . .

16 and
behold also if he sayeth unto the
waters of the great deep be thou dried up and it is done

17 behold if he sayeth unto this mountain be
thou raised up and come over and fall upon that city that it be buried up and behold it is done . . .

19 and if the Lord shall say be thou
accursed that no man shall find thee from this time henceforth and forever and behold no man getteth it henceforth
and forever

20 and
behold if the Lord shall say unto a
man because of thine iniquities thou shalt be accursed forever and it shall be done

21 and if the Lord shall say because of thine
iniquities thou shalt be cut off from my presence and he will cause that it shall be so

These examples of the if-and construction in the
original text suggest that Joseph Smith did not simply get the idea of a
conditional construction in his mind. If that had been the case, he should have
translated that idea using the English if-then construction, possibly
without the then, but in any event, without the connective and. The multiple occurrence of
the non-English if-and construction suggests that even the word and was controlled for.

Conclusion

Evidence from the original manuscript supports the
traditional belief that Joseph Smith received a revealed text through the
interpreters. This idea of a controlled text originates with statements made by
the witnesses of the translation. The evidence from the original manuscript,
when joined with internal evidence from the text itself, suggests that this
control was tight, but not iron-clad. The text could be “ungrammatical”
from a prescriptive point of view, but the use of nonstandard English is not
evidence that the text was not being tightly controlled, or that it did not
come from the Lord, who apparently does not share our insistence on “proper
English” (see D&C 1:24). In fact, the occurrence of non-English
Hebraisms such as the if-and construction strongly suggests that the text
was tightly controlled, down to the level of the word at least. And the
spelling of names such as Coriantumr suggests that control could be imposed down
to the very letter.

All of this evidence (from the original manuscript,
witnesses’ statements, and from the text itself) is thus consistent with the
hypothesis that Joseph Smith could actually see (whether in the interpreters
themselves or in his mind’s eye) the translated English text—word for
word and letter for letter—and that he read off this revealed text to his
scribe. Despite Joseph’s reading off of the text, one should not assume that
this process was automatic or easily done. Joseph had to prepare himself
spiritually for this work. Yet the evidence suggests that Joseph Smith was not
the author of the Book of Mormon, not even its English language translation,
although it was revealed spiritually through him and in his own language.

 

 

Part 2: The Printing

 

 

Occasionally historians and other observers of the past
attempt to discredit someone’s account of a past event by referring to the age
of the person when the account was given. Age frequently becomes an argument
against the account if the historian or observer does not agree with the
implications of that account.

Yet the real issue is
how an account matches up with other accounts or, even more significantly, how
it matches up with the physical evidence that remains. Independent, physical
evidence can often be used to test the reliability of accounts. A good example
of this procedure in analyzing accounts can be found in the analysis by Don
Enders of numerous statements made in E. D. Howe’s 1834 Mormonism Unvailed, in
particular, claims by some of the residents around Palmyra that Joseph Smith’s
family were poor and lazy. Enders compared these claims against the original
land and tax records and other local government papers from the 1820s and 1830s
and discovered that the assessment of Joseph Smith Sr.’s property, based on the
1830 tax records, shows that the valuation of the Smith farm per acre exceeded
that of nine out of ten farms owned by families who criticized the Smiths in Mormonism Unvailed. This
finding calls into question the overall validity of these accounts in Howe’s
book denigrating the Smiths’ work ethic.24

In this section, I would like to consider a statement made
by John Gilbert, the compositor (or typesetter) for the 1830 edition of the
Book of Mormon. Gilbert made this statement on 9 September 1892, when he was 90
years old. In his statement, a typescript located in the King’s Daughters
Library in Palmyra, Gilbert describes events that occurred 63 years earlier.
Now of course we could dismiss his account (if we didn’t like what he was
saying about the early publishing history of the Book of Mormon) by simply
referring to his age, or the lateness in making this statement, or even his
anti-Mormon bias. But the better procedure is to test this statement against
what we have been able to discover about the printing of the first edition of
the Book of Mormon.

This process includes evidence from the two Book of Mormon
manuscripts: the original manuscript and the printer’s manuscript. The original
manuscript is the dictated manuscript the scribes wrote down as Joseph Smith
translated the Book of Mormon. During 1829–30, a copy of the original
manuscript was made. This copy is called the printer’s manuscript because, for
the most part, this was the manuscript that was taken to the printer’s shop in
Palmyra, New York, where the type was set
for the first edition of the Book of Mormon, published in 1830. About 28% of
the original manuscript is extant. Most of the extant portions of the original
manuscript are owned by the LDS Church. The printer’s manuscript is owned by
the RLDS Church and is extant except for three lines. Fragments of the original
manuscript show that the original (dictated) manuscript rather than the copied
printer’s manuscript was used to set the 1830 edition from Helaman 13 through
Mormon 9.25

In addition to the two manuscripts, this analysis of John
Gilbert’s statement has involved the examination of about one hundred copies of
the 1830 edition, an original proof sheet of the 1830 title page, and a
complete set of unbound sheets of the 1830 edition (sometimes called the “uncut
sheets”) that Gilbert had saved.

I reproduce Gilbert’s entire statement (as a typographical
facsimile) at the end of this article, but here I list a number of claims
Gilbert made in that statement about the printing of the 1830 edition and
compare those claims with the extant physical evidence dating from 1829 and
1830.

1. 500 pages
of manuscript

A few pages of the
manuscript were submitted as a specimen of the whole, and it was said there
would be about 500 pages.26

There were 466 pages in the printer’s manuscript and
probably a few more in the original manuscript, perhaps as many as 480 pages.
In either case, the estimate that Gilbert remembered is close to the actual
number of pages.

2. 5,000
copies of the 1830 edition for $3,000

In the forepart of June 1829, Mr. E. B. Grandin, the
printer of the “Wayne Sentinel,” came to me and said he wanted I
should assist him in estimating the cost of printing 5,000 copies of a book
that Martin Harris wanted to get printed, which was called the “Mormon
Bible.” . . .

The contract was to print and bind with leather 5,000
copies for $3,000.

The number 5,000 agrees with other
accounts of the press run for the 1830 edition. For instance, these same
figures are found in Joseph Smith’s 1839 History, in both the draft and the
final versions.27 The final version
reads:

Mean time our translation drawing to a close, we went to
Palmyra, Wayne Country, N.Y: Secured the Copyright; and agreed with Mr Egbert
Grandin to print five thousand Copies, for the sum of three thousand dollars.

3. 1,000 ems
per printed page

The size of the page was agreed upon, and an estimate of
the number of ems in a page, which would be 1,000.

An em is a measure of type width equal to the point size of
the font being used. There are about 1,075 ems per page in the 1830 edition,
with 25 ems per line and 43 lines per page (excluding the header on each page).
Gilbert’s recollection of the estimated number of ems is close to the actual
count for an 1830 page.28

4. Manuscript
page somewhat longer than an
1830 printed page

A page of manuscript would make more than a page of printed
matter, which proved to be correct.

As already noted, there are 466 pages of manuscript in the
printer’s manuscript and perhaps as many as 480 pages were in the original
manuscript. The 1830 edition itself has 590 pages, which means that one
manuscript page provided about one and a fourth pages in the 1830 edition.

5. A new font
of small pica

Mr. Grandin got a new font of small pica, on which the body
of the work was printed.

The “small pica” of the 1830 edition is a 10-point
type. The type used in the 1830 edition is called Scotch Roman, a very common
type designed about 1810 by Richard Austin in Edinburgh, Scotland. This type
face was widely used throughout the nineteenth century.29

The type used in the 1830 edition had only a few pieces of
broken type. The type imprint in 1830 copies is sharp and clean and shows
little wear.

6. 24 pages on
foolscap paper

When the printer was ready to commence work, [Martin]
Harris was notified, and Hyrum Smith brought the first installment of manuscript,
of 24 pages, closely written on common foolscap paper.

The entire printer’s manuscript is a collection of
gatherings of sheets. To form a gathering, Oliver Cowdery (the principal scribe
for the printer’s manuscript, as well as the original manuscript) would
typically take 6 sheets of foolscap paper (a size of paper), line them, and
fold them down the center to form a gathering of 24 pages or 12 leaves. Later,
after writing the text, he would secure the gathering by producing at least 4
holes (or “stabs”) along the fold (or “gutters”) and
weaving in yarn and then tying it to hold the gathering together. The very
first gathering for the printer’s manuscript starts at the beginning of 1 Nephi
and goes up to 1 Nephi 14:21. Like most of the other gatherings in the printer’s
manuscript, this first one contains 24 pages (6 foolscap sheets folded
widthwise to form 12 leaves or 24 pages).

Foolscap paper originally referred to a watermark showing a
fool’s cap, but by the 1800s this term was universally used to refer to a paper
size. The sheets for the printer’s manuscript show some variance, but range
from 31.4 to 33.1 cm in width and from 38.3 to 41.5 cm in length. Published
accounts (given in the Oxford English Dictionary under “foolscap”)
indicate that foolscap paper varied from 12 to 13.5 inches in width and from 15
to 17 inches in length (that is, from 30 to 34 cm in width and 38 to 43 cm in
length). All the sheets in the printer’s manuscript are within these bounds, as
are the extant sheets of the original manuscript.

7. Proof sheet
of title page alone

The title page was first set up, and after proof was read
and corrected, several copies were printed for [Martin] Harris and his friends.

One of the individuals in the print shop that day was
Stephen Selwyn Harding, who later served as territorial governor of Utah
(1862–63). Harding received one of these copies of the proof sheet of the
title page and in 1847 donated his copy to the LDS Church. This copy has been
on display at the Church Museum in Salt Lake City. In comparing this proof
sheet with the title page as actually published, we see that a number of
misspellings were corrected; in addition, the spacing (or “leading”)
between the various lines, especially in the title and subtitle, was increased.

8. Grammatical
“errors” not corrected

On the second day—[Martin] Harris and [Hyrum] Smith
being in the office—I called their attention to a grammatical error, and
asked whether I should correct it? Harris consulted with Smith a short time,
and turned to me and said: “The Old Testament is ungrammatical, set it as
it is written.”

For the most part,
Gilbert did not edit out the grammatical “errors.” The vast
majority of them were copied over straight from the manuscripts into the 1830
edition. In some cases some accidental correction seems to have occurred. And
in a handful of cases we have specific evidence that either John Gilbert or
Oliver Cowdery consciously corrected what was perceived to be pronominal redundancies. For instance, in Ether 9:8, the
printer’s manuscript originally read as follows:

& now the brother of him that suffered death & his
name was Nimrah & he was angry with his father because of that which his
father had done unto his brother

While punctuating the manuscript to set the type for
this part of the text, Gilbert placed the intrusive “& his name was Nimrah” in parentheses and then
crossed out the words “& he” that followed. This kind of
conscious editing is infrequent in the text. The vast majority of “ungrammatical”
expressions were left unchanged.

9. Scribes for
the printer’s manuscript

Martin Harris, Hyrum Smith, and Oliver Cowdery were very
frequent visitors to the office during the printing of the Mormon Bible. The
manuscript was supposed to be in the handwriting of Cowdery. . . .

Cowdery held and looked over the manuscript when most of
the proofs were read. Martin Harris once or twice, and Hyrum Smith once,
Grandin supposing these men could read their own writing as well, if not
better, than anyone else; and if there are any discrepancies between the
Palmyra edition and the manuscript these men should be held responsible.

The printer’s manuscript
is mostly in Oliver Cowdery’s hand (84.6%). A not-yet-identified scribe
(referred to as scribe 2) accounts for 14.9% of the printer’s manuscript. This
scribe basically transcribed two large portions (from Mosiah 25 to Alma 13, and
from 3 Nephi 19 to the end of Mormon), but in the first portion, Hyrum Smith
briefly took over for scribe 2 on five different occasions (from Mosiah 28 to
Alma 5). Hyrum’s minor contribution amounts to only 0.5% of the text.

But the printer never saw
the second portion done by scribe 2. Instead, the original manuscript was taken
in for this portion of the typesetting. All extant fragments of the original
manuscript from this part of the text (from Helaman 13 to the end of Mormon)
are in Oliver Cowdery’s hand, so if we presume that all this portion of the
original manuscript was in Oliver’s hand, the 1830 printer saw Oliver Cowdery’s
hand for slightly over 91% of the text. By this calculation, scribe 2 then
accounts for 8.5% of the text and Hyrum the remaining 0.5%. So Gilbert’s
comment that the manuscript was supposed to be in Oliver’s hand is probably
accurate for about 91% of the text.

Gilbert’s comment that Oliver Cowdery did most of the
proofing, but that Martin Harris did it twice and Hyrum Smith once is
intriguing, especially since these rankings are consistent with the frequency
with which the printer set type from the handwriting of Oliver Cowdery, scribe
2, and Hyrum Smith. The additional statement from Grandin about proofing “their
own writing” suggests that Martin Harris might have been scribe 2,
although of course Gilbert’s initial statement about the handwriting implies
that Oliver Cowdery was the only scribe. Except for his signature, there are
apparently no identified extant examples of Martin Harris’s handwriting.30

We also have definite
evidence that Oliver Cowdery was learning from his proofing of the 1830
edition. For instance, by the time he got into 3 Nephi, Oliver had learned that exceeding(ly) is spelled with two e‘s after the c, not as exceding(ly), which is how he consistently spelled the word in
the original manuscript as well as in the printer’s manuscript before 3 Nephi
12:12. From then on in the printer’s manuscript, Oliver always spelled exceeding(ly) correctly.

In addition, Oliver Cowdery also learned to hyphenate at the
end of lines. Earlier he had always hyphenated at the beginning of the line (in
the original manuscript and the first part of the printer’s manuscript). For
example, in the original manuscript, if only accord of according fit at the end of a line, Oliver would have written accord at the end of
the line and -ing at the beginning of the next line. But when he
finally learned that hyphenation occurs at the end of the line, Oliver would
have written accord- at the end of the line, but still he would
have kept the hyphen at the beginning of the next line (that is, -ing),
thus ending up with two hyphens.

Oliver Cowdery started
this practice of double hyphenation at the beginning of 2 Nephi (page 49 in the
printer’s manuscript), but here he put hyphens at the end of a line only once
or twice a page, so that in this part of the printer’s manuscript most
hyphenated words had only a single hyphen, at the beginning of a line.
But by the time Oliver got through 200 pages of the printer’s manuscript, he
started to hyphenate more frequently at the ends of lines, so that ultimately
in the last half of the manuscript we
often find double hyphenation more than ten times a page.

10. Paragraphing and
punctuation in the manuscript

Every chapter, if I remember correctly, was one solid
paragraph, without a punctuation mark, from beginning to end.

. . . I punctuated it to make it read as I supposed the
author intended, and but very little punctuation was altered in proof-reading.

Originally, very little
punctuation appeared on the printer’s manuscript and virtually none on the
original manuscript, including that portion (from Helaman 13 to the end of
Mormon) used to set the type for the 1830 edition. For the first part of the
printer’s manuscript, Oliver Cowdery copied the original manuscript without
adding punctuation. He finally realized that he himself could add the
punctuation, so beginning with page 106 of the printer’s manuscript, Oliver
started to add a little punctuation, but only sporadically and never
systematically. Moreover, Gilbert basically ignored Oliver’s punctuation.

Beginning with page 129 of the printer’s manuscript, Oliver
Cowdery added paragraph marks as he prepared this manuscript, but by page 145
he stopped this practice, probably because he had realized that the compositor
was ignoring his suggested paragraph breaks. In any event, all the original
chapters in the Book of Mormon manuscripts were written as a single paragraph.
Gilbert is responsible for the actual paragraphing in the 1830 edition,
although he does not mention it in this statement. While inserting punctuation,
he would also use the letter P (not the reversed paragraph
symbol ¶)
whenever he wanted to show the beginning of a new paragraph.

Scribe 2, unlike Oliver Cowdery, fairly consistently
punctuated the portions of the printer’s manuscript that he was responsible
for, although scribe 2 had only a single punctuation mark that sometimes looks
like a period and sometimes like a small comma. This same mark is used
interchangeably for both full and half stops. Once more, for the first portion
of scribe 2’s handwriting (from Mosiah 25 to Alma 13), Gilbert ignored this
rather confusing punctuation mark from scribe 2.

As Gilbert indicated, he basically typeset the 1830 edition
with the same punctuation marks that he had placed in the printer’s manuscript.
I would estimate that over 90% of Gilbert’s punctuation marks in the printer’s
and original manuscripts were carried over without change into the 1830
edition.

11. Capitalization in the manuscript

Names of persons and places were generally capitalized,
but sentences had no end. The character & was used almost invariably where
the word and occurred, except at the end of a chapter.

In those portions of the original manuscript in the hand of
Oliver Cowdery, the first word in a chapter was systematically capitalized (as
were names). If the first word was and, it was written as And. Gilbert’s “end of a chapter” refers, of course, to the beginning of a
new chapter, since one implies the other. But other sentence-initial words in
the original manuscript were generally not capitalized by Oliver. And he wrote
virtually all other examples of and as an ampersand (&).
Oliver nearly always followed this same practice in the printer’s manuscript.
In a couple instances in the manuscripts, Oliver did write and as and, but in each case he had accidentally started to write some other word and he
then overwrote the incorrect word by writing out the full and rather than using the shorter ampersand.

On the other hand, it should be noted that in the book of
Helaman, Oliver Cowdery started to occasionally show the beginning of a new
sentence in the middle of a chapter by capitalizing the sentence-initial word,
as in Helaman 5:5–6:

for they remembered the words which their father Helaman
spake unto them & these are the words which he spake Behold my Sons I
desire that . . .

Although Oliver
never consistently applied this practice in the rest of the printer’s manuscript,
still he occasionally did capitalize a few sentence-initial words in the middle
of a chapter. And eventually, there are examples of mid-chapter sentences
beginning with And instead of &as in 3 Nephi 13:34–14:1:

sufficient is the day unto the evil thereof And now it came
to pass that . . .

Although this sentence begins chapter 14 in our current
chapter system (dating from Orson Pratt’s editing for the 1879 edition),
originally this sentence occurred about one-third the way through chapter VI of
3 Nephi. But since this part of the printer’s manuscript was never seen by John
Gilbert, he never saw this example of a mid-chapter And. Only in a few
cases in Ether and Moroni of the printer’s manuscript could Gilbert have seen
in the middle of a chapter an occasional And instead of Oliver Cowdery’s
much more frequent &. In nearly all instances, Gilbert would have seen
& in the printer’s manuscript.

The two other scribes in
the printer’s manuscript (scribe 2 and Hyrum Smith) used both & and and interchangeably, but this variation would have
occurred for only 8.9% of the text (from Mosiah 25 to Alma 13). In any event,
Gilbert’s recollection of the massive use of & is accurate for the vast majority of the Book of
Mormon text.

12. John Gilbert works on the manuscript at home

After working a few days, I said to [Hyrum] Smith on his
handing me the manuscript in the morning: “Mr. Smith, if you would leave
this manuscript with me, I would take it home with me at night and read and
punctuate it, and I could get along faster in the day time, for now I have
frequently to stop and read half a page to find how to punctuate it.” His
reply was, “We are commanded not to leave it.” A few mornings after
this, when Smith handed me the manuscript, he said to me: “If you will
give your word that this manuscript shall be returned to us when you get
through with it, I will leave it with you.” I assured Smith that it should
be returned all right when I got through with it. For two or three nights I
took it home with me and read it, and punctuated it with a lead pencil. This
will account for the punctuation marks in pencil.

John Gilbert had to wait more than “a few mornings”
after “a few days” before getting permission to take the printer’s
manuscript home to punctuate it. In the first part of the manuscript, before
page 73, there are only a few minor places where Gilbert added punctuation to the manuscript. These
few punctuation marks are all in pencil. When Gilbert refers to reading down
half a page of manuscript to determine the punctuation, he was apparently
trying to determine the reading of the text and then adding the punctuation to
the typeset text only, not on the manuscript itself (except in those few
cases).

The first place where Gilbert began to systematically
punctuate the printer’s manuscript is on page 73 (beginning with 2 Nephi 17:4).
Since this place is about one-sixth the way through the manuscript, Gilbert’s
impression about when he started to take the manuscript home is a little too
early. I would estimate that he probably took the manuscript home sometime in
the last half of September 1829, after at least one month of printing.

We do have evidence that Gilbert took the manuscript home
for two days. For these two sessions, Gilbert marked the punctuation in heavy
black ink, not in pencil. The first session covers pages 73–75 of the
printer’s manuscript. The second session covers pages 77–79 and the first
third of page 80.

After these two sessions, all of Gilbert’s subsequent
punctuation marks on the printer’s manuscript (and on the original manuscript
for Helaman 13 through the end of Mormon) are in pencil rather than ink.
Gilbert’s penciling seems to be restricted to work actually done in the
printing shop, not at home, especially since his punctuation marks are
interspersed with take marks (also in pencil) that were made during the actual
setting of the type. (These take marks show where in the manuscript the
compositor finished setting the type for a portion of the text.)

Since the clear majority of Gilbert’s punctuation is in
pencil, it is understandable that he might not have remembered that he used ink
for the two nights he took the manuscript home to prepare it for typesetting.

13. Details about the signatures

The [Mormon] Bible was printed 16 pages at a time, so that
one sheet of paper made two copies of 16 pages each, requiring 2,500 sheets of
paper for each form of 16 pages. There were 37 forms of 16 pages each, 570
pages in all.

The 1830 edition has 16 pages to a signature and has 37
signatures. Of course, Gilbert could determine this by referring to a copy of
the edition (or perhaps to his set of 37 unbound folded sheets). There are,
however, 592 pages in the 1830 edition (37 x 16 = 592), of which the last two
are blank, thus giving 590 printed pages, not 570. Perhaps the 570 is a typo
for 590.

The 2,500 sheets for each
signature would thus account for 5,000 copies since they were printing
all 16 pages of each signature on both sides of the sheet. This process, called
half-sheet imposition (or in more modern terminology, “work and turn”),
requires that each sheet be properly oriented and lined up (a process referred
to as registering) before printing the opposite side. Finally, the 2,500 larger
sheets were torn or cut in two—so that prior to binding, 5,000 copies of
each signature were available.

Examination of the unbound sheets shows quite clearly the
torn side at the top of each of the 37 signatures. Here each of the original
larger sheets was folded and cut along the crease with a bone cutter (personal
communication from Don Enders), which left a rough, tornlike edge. The bottom
edge has always been cut mechanically, whereas the sides always show a deckle
edge—that is, the original uneven edge that results from the paper-making
process itself. In addition, the two pinholes resulting from pinning down the
middle of the full sheet to the tympan (the frame to which the sheet is secured
during the presswork) can be found about half the time near the torn upper edge
of the unbound sheets. Thus the unbound sheets clearly show that Gilbert’s
statement about printing 2,500 sheets to produce 5,000 copies was entirely
accurate.31

Conclusion

From these many examples, we can see that in every instance,
John Gilbert’s recollections regarding the printing of the 1830 edition of the
Book of Mormon are either precisely correct or, where wrong, the error is
easily explained. In a number of cases where he thought something held in every
instance, the actual facts show that his recollection is still correct for the
clear majority of cases. All in all, these examples show that Gilbert’s memory
is very accurate, even at 90 years of age and 63 years after the fact.32

 

 

Notes

 

 

Editors’ note: Part 1 of this article was originally
published as “Translating the Book of Mormon: Evidence from the Original
Manuscript,” in Book of Mormon Authorship Revisited, edited by
Reynolds, 61–93; part 2 was originally published as “John Gilbert’s
1892 Account of the 1830 Printing of the Book of Mormon,” in The Disciple
as Witness
, edited by Ricks, Parry, and Hedges, 383–405.

1. I
wish to thank Richard L. Anderson and John W. Welch for their critiques of an
earlier version of this section.

2. Manuscript
History of the Church, Book A-1, 121–22, cited in Richard Lloyd Anderson,
“‘By the Gift and Power of God,'” Ensign 7 (September 1977):
79–85.

3. See
the general bibliography at the end of “Translating the Book of Mormon:
Evidence from the Original Manuscript,” 91, for a list of sources that
discuss the witnesses’ statements.

4. Joseph
Smith, “History, 1839,” in The Papers of Joseph Smith, ed.
Dean C. Jessee (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1989), 1:284.

5. Milton
V. Backman Jr., Eyewitness Accounts of the Restoration (Orem, UT:
Grandin Book, 1983), 209–13 (quoting John A. Clark, Gleanings By
the Way
 [Philadelphia: W. J. and J. K. Simon, 1842], 222–31)
and 215–23 (quoting two letters of Charles Anthon, the first in E. D.
Howe, Mormonism
Unvailed
 [Painesville, OH: E. D. Howe, 1834], 270–2), and
the second in Clark, Gleanings By the Way, 233, 237–38).

6. Joseph
Smith III, “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” The Saints’
Herald
 26/19 (1 October 1879): 289–90.

7. Dean
C. Jessee, “Joseph Knight’s Recollection of Early Mormon History,” BYU Studies 17/1 (1976): 35.

8. John
W. Welch, “The Miraculous Translation of the Book of Mormon,” in Opening the
Heavens,
 129 (citing Edmund C. Briggs, “A Visit to Nauvoo in
1856,” Journal
of History
 9 [January 1916]: 454).

9. Edward
Stevenson, “One of the Three Witnesses. Incidents in the Life of Martin
Harris,” The Latter-Day Saints’ Millennial Star 44/5–6
(30 January and 6 February 1882): 78–89, 86–87.

10. Lyndon
W. Cook, ed., David Whitmer Interviews: A Restoration Witness (Orem,
UT: Grandin Book, 1991), 3.

11. Cook, David
Whitmer Interviews,
 115.

12. The
original typescript signed by Samuel Richards is located in the Family and
Church History Department, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
(Samuel Whitney Richards Collection, Ms 6576, Box 2, Folder 14); the quotes
here are based on a transcript (made by Scott Faulring) of the statement.

13. Joseph
Smith III, “Last Testimony of Sister Emma,” 290.

14. See
Dean C. Jessee, ed., The Personal Writings of Joseph Smith (Salt Lake City:
Deseret Book, 1984), 252, 260, 285, and 427.

15. See
the example posess, first crossed out and then rewritten the same way, in Jessee, Personal
Writings of Joseph Smith,
 21; the 1840 possession is found on page 468.

16. Ibid.,
261.

17. For
a published photograph of this respelling, see page 221 in Daniel H. Ludlow,
ed., Encyclopedia
of Mormonism 
(New York: Macmillan, 1992).

18. Welch, Translation
of the Book of Mormon, 
129.

19. Cook, David
Whitmer Interviews,
 174.

20. David
Whitmer, An
Address to All Believers in Christ
 (Richmond, MO: David Whitmer,
1887), 12.

21. Cook, David
Whitmer Interviews,
 62.

22. For
further discussion of whether or not the Lord himself insists on using standard
English, see the discussion in Royal Skousen, “Towards a Critical Edition
of the Book of Mormon,” BYU Studies 30/1 (1990):
54–56.

23. “Book
of Mormon Translation by Joseph Smith,” in Encyclopedia of Mormonism, 1:210–13.

24. Donald
L. Enders, “The Joseph Smith, Sr., Family: Farmers of the Genesee,”
in Joseph
Smith: The Prophet, the Man,
 ed. Susan Easton Black and Charles D.
Tate Jr. (Provo, UT: BYU Religious Studies Center, 1993), 213–25; see
page 220 for the nine-out-of-ten statistic.

25. For further information about the
use of the original manuscript as the printer’s copy, see Royal Skousen,
“Piecing Together the Original Manuscript,” BYU Today (May 1992): 18–24; or Royal Skousen, “The Book of Mormon Critical
Text Project,” in Joseph Smith: The Prophet, the Man, 65–75.

26. To
enhance readability, a few changes (mostly in punctuation and grammar) have
been made in the quotations from the typographical facsimile that appears at
the end of this article.

27. See The
Papers of Joseph Smith,
 1:241 and 300.

28. I
wish to thank Jonathan Saltzman for help in determining these figures.

29. I
wish to thank Jonathan Saltzman for identifying the type face for the 1830
edition. For further information about Scotch Roman, see W. Pincus Jaspert, W.
Turner Berry, and A. F. Johnson, The Encyclopaedia of Type Faces, 4th ed. (Poole, Dorset, England: Blandford, 1970), 203.

30. For
an early discussion of this problem, see Dean C. Jessee, “New Documents
and Mormon Beginnings,” BYU Studies 24/4 (1984): 397–428.

31. I wish to thank Louis E. Crandall
of the Crandall Historical Printing Museum (Provo, UT) for his valuable
assistance in identifying these aspects of the unbound sheets. For further
information on printing in the 1800s and earlier, see Ronald B. McKerrow, An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students (1928; reprint, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll, 1994), 22–23 (for
registering), 19 and 45–46 (for
the tympan), 66–70 (for half-sheet imposition), and 103 (for deckle
edge).

32. I wish
to thank Richard L. Anderson and Larry C. Porter for providing copies of
Gilbert’s 1892 statement. Scott Faulring provided access to some related
documents; Matthew Empey, my research assistant, helped collect some of the
information for this section. Don Enders also provided a helpful critique of
this paper as well as some additional information.