4000 changes to the Book of Mormon

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mkprr
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4000 changes to the Book of Mormon

Post by mkprr » Fri Apr 15, 2011 12:19 am

Sam has written a list of great questions under the thread "How can you trust the Book of Mormon"

I am attempting to address as best I can some of his questions there but I figure this one is probably deserving of it's own thread because it is a pretty big question.
How can you trust the Book of Mormon? If the Book of Mormon is the most correct of any book on earth, as Joseph Smith said, why does it contain over 4000 changes from the original 1830 edition?

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mkprr
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Re: 4000 changes to the Book of Mormon

Post by mkprr » Fri Apr 15, 2011 12:28 am

In short, I can trust the Book of Mormon because I have an accurate understanding of what it claims to be, and what it doesn’t claim to be. You may not be aware of this but you are only quoting a small portion of Josephs Smith’s sentence, the rest of his statement sheds light on what he means by “most correct”. Joseph Smith said “that the Book of Mormon was the most correct of any book on earth, . . . and a man would get nearer to God by abiding by its precepts, than any other book”. Note that what the Book is so correct about are it’s theological teachings about God and man’s relationship to God and especially how we can come to know Him. The statement says nothing about the translations use of proper grammar or word choice among similar synonyms. It also says nothing about how accurately or fully the original ancient authors recorded historical events. The LDS website http://www.lds.org further clarifies “The appropriate sense of correct as used by Joseph Smith in this statement would be, “Set right, or made straight. Hence, right; conformable to truth” (Noah Webster, An American Dictionary of the English Language [1828]).”

There is no question that the Book of Mormon has gone through corrective and clarifying changes. BYU, a college owned and operated by the LDS church, has published a Book of Mormon Critical text that you can get at amazon.com comparing all changes found from the original manuscript to our current edition. First edition copies of the Book of Mormon are also printed by the church’s printing press and can be viewed online or purchased from deseret book. Much research has been published for free on BYU’s website. Here is an article talking about the BOM critical text you might find interesting. Generally articles at by BYU’s Maxwell Institute are pretty in depth, and balanced scholarly articles, I recommend looking around here. http://maxwellinstitute.byu.edu/publica ... m=3&id=457


As you will find if you study the changes made, most of the 4000 changes you talk about are simply corrections of transcription errors. Joseph Smith dictated the Book of Mormon as scribes worked to write it down by hand, after this a printers manuscript was copied by hand and a typesetter trying to read the scribes handwriting set the print (this is a very tedious process, remember no computers). Most changes to the Book of Mormon have been an attempt to match the printed version back with the original dictated manuscript. There were other changes made to modernize spelling and grammar. Some sentence structure changes were made as well for clarification. While none of these changes alter the meaning of the original manuscript, there are about 5 or 6 changes that I know of that do change the meaning of sentences in the Book of Mormon quite substantially. I haven’t read through the critical manuscript but I have read many websites critical of the Book of Mormon to find this information. I figure they will do the best job at putting forth the worst cases of Book of Mormon changes they can find. I’d be glad to go over these changes if you are interested and I think they are important to know for someone who wants to take an honest and critical look at the Book of Mormon.

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