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Notes from “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon” (1)

Notes from “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon” (1)

Last updated on: January 4, 2020 at 3:56 pm by Dan Peterson

Notes from “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon” (1) 2020-01-04T15:56:03-07:00 Dan Peterson

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A statue of the Angel Moroni by Torleif Knaphus stands atop the Hill Cumorah, just south of Palmyra, New York, commemorating the revelation and recovery of the Book of Mormon.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

John W. Welch, “Timing the Translation of the Book of Mormon: ‘Days [and Hours] Never to Be Forgotten,'” BYU Studies Quarterly 57/4 (2018): 10-50.

From Richard Bushman’s jacket endorsement of Opening the Heavens: Laying open “all the crucial documents . . . for inspection, with enough commentary to put them in context[,]” provides great benefits to Book of Mormon readers: “nothing could be more helpful — and inspiring.” (16)

The Book of Mormon was dictated over the course of, at the very most, about seventy-five working days. (13)

“with the probable exception of a few pages written before Oliver Cowdery’s arrival on April 5 [1829], the vast majority of the English text of the Book of Mormon came forth, day after day, and hour by hour, beginning April 7 and ending the weekend of June 30, 1829.” (17)

Experience of Three Witnesses — probably 28-29 June 1829 (29, 32)

Experience of Eight Witnesses — probably 30 June 1829, perhaps 1-2 July 1829 (29, 32)

“Such detail regarding the foundational events of any new religious movement is, as far as I know, unequalled.” (17)

The maximum allowable time for dictation is 74 days. (31)

Welch argues for 57-63 actual working days. (33-34)

“it would appear that not many more than the equivalent of about 60 actual working days would have been available in April, May, and June 1829.” (34)

“they . . . needed to work continuously, diligently, and largely without interruption.” (38)

Citing the estimate of Royal Skousen, The Original Manuscript of the Book of Mormon (Provo, Utah: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 2001), 35-36: There were 269,510 words in the earliest text of the Book of Mormon, which is to say in the dictation text. (22)

Using the figure of sixty dictation days, my calculation: 269,510 words / 60 days = approximately 4,492 words dictated per day. Nearly nine pages in the current standard English edition of the Book of Mormon daily — 8.85, to be precise. That’s a remarkable pace. I write fairly easily and rapidly, and I’ve never come close to it for any significant length of time, if indeed I’ve ever done it at all.

The remarkable dictation speed is impressive in and of itself. But it’s striking to look at specific passages with that rapidity of writing in mind. For example:

In Alma 36:22, which was dictated in Harmony, Pennsylvania, most likely around 24 April, the prophet Alma quotes exactly twenty-two words from Lehi as they’re found in 1 Nephi 1:8, a passage that hadn’t been dictated yet. It would be supplied on roughly 5 June 1829, in Fayette, New York, as replacement material for the famous lost manuscript pages. That’s nearly 1.5 months later. Not bad for a “writer” who is said never to have consulted the material already produced before he commenced a new day of dictation.

To be continued.

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