This is an excerpt from “A Reply from a Former CES Employee.” The entire document can be downloaded for free.
This is a line-by-line response to Jeremy Runnells’ “Letter to a CES Director: Why I Lost My Testimony. Jeremy’s words are in green, the color of life, while mine are in black, the color of darkness.
2.When King James translators were translating the KJV Bible between 1604 and 1611, they would occasionally put in their own words into the text to make the English more readable. We know exactly what these words are because they’re italicized in the KJV Bible. What are these 17th century italicized words doing in the Book of Mormon? Word for word? What does this say about the Book of Mormon being an ancient record?
The insertions are more than occasional. You see italicized insertions in almost every verse. They’re verbs. English uses them; Hebrew does not. Without them, the text isn’t “less readable;” it’s essentially unreadable.
You demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of how the KJV translation was performed to claim that only the italicized words, which are highlighted as an admission that they have no direct Hebrew antecedent, represent a KJV translator’s “own words.” Every word in the KJV represents a translator’s choice for how to best express the original text’s meaning as they understood it. So, really, every single word, italics or no, is a translator “putting in their own words” what they think the original text means. That’s why you can have so many different Bible translations that express similar or even identical meaning using widely varied vocabulary. That’s also why you can’t adequately translate anything of any length just by plopping the original text into a computer program a la Google Translate or Babelfish, which don’t recognize idioms and essentially produce stilted gibberish.
This calls for a demonstration. Here’s your Question #2, translated into Hebrew via Google Translate:
2. כאשר מתרגם המלך ג’יימס תרגמו את התנ”ך KJV בין 1604 ו 1611, הם היו שמים מדי פעם במילות שלהם לתוך הטקסט כדי להפוך את אנגלית קריאה יותר. אנחנו יודעים בדיוק מה המילים האלה הן בגלל שהם באות נטויות בתנ”ך KJV. מהן המילים המודגשות המאה ה -17 האלה עושים בספר המורמונים? מילה במילה? מה זה אומר על הספר המורמונים להיות שיא עתיק?
Pretty impressive, no? Well, no. At least, not after you retranslate it back into English using the same method. Here’s what you get:
2. When King James Bible translated the KJV between 1604 and 1611, they were occasionally put their words into the text to make reading more English. We know exactly what those words are in italics because they KJV Bible . What are the italicized words in the 17th century, these are the Book of Mormon? Verbatim? What does this say about the Book of Mormon to be an old record?
Suddenly, your original question transforms into a query about a magical racist book that has the capacity to inject words into other books in order to “make reading more English” in a universe where words in italics are the KJV Bible, except in the 17th Century, when those words are the Book of Mormon. Verbatim.
Translation requires judgment and choices on the part of the translator, and it’s unlikely that any two translations of any lengths will produce significantly similar, let alone identical, texts.
So when you ask “What does this say about the Book of Mormon being an ancient record?” you’re asking the wrong question. This doesn’t say anything about whether or not the Book of Mormon is an ancient record. The KJV verbiage is considered by most scholars to be a perfectly adequate representation of the original Isaiah text, so if the same original Isaiah text existed on the Small Plates of Nephi, the version in 2 Nephi would also constitute an acceptable rendition of the original author’s intent.
So the better question is the one you ask before your query about B of M antiquity – i.e. why is this KJV language in the Book of Mormon at all? If Joseph Smith’s translation were being performed in the same manner as the KJV translation was performed, then Joseph would have the responsibility to clothe the Hebrew concepts in the English language with his own word choices. And, as I noted above, his choices would not be at all likely to be significantly similar, let alone identical, to a 17th Century translator in Jacobean England. So the logical conclusion is the one your question implies – Joseph was a simple plagiarist.
Except it’s not nearly so simple.
Because the fact is that there are oodles of departures from the King James language in the Book of Mormon – 54 percent of the Isaiah verses in the Book of Mormon are at least slightly different from the KJV – and many of them are very difficult to explain if all Joseph was doing was copying from a dusty Bible on the bookshelf. For instance, a bunch of us unofficial apologists make a big deal out of 2 Nephi 12:16, which combines elements from the Septuagint (“upon all the ships of the sea”) and the KJV (“and upon all the ships of Tarshish”) in a way that no other version of Isaiah 2:16 does. Both wouldn’t be there if all Joseph were doing was cutting and pasting. It seems like a ridiculous amount of effort for him to research original sources only to come up with this little tidbit for a throwaway clause in an obscure verse, yet it also seems unlikely that he would hit a bullseye like this purely by accident. How did this happen? In fact, if all he was engaged in was simple plagiarism, why are there any departures from the KJV language at all, let alone in more than half the verses?
There is a growing body of really fascinating research to suggest Joseph was engaged in what some refer to as a “tight” translation – that Joseph’s job was essentially to read the words as they appeared on his seerstone or whatever else, and that he had only little to no input into word choices the way the KJV translators did. Royal Skousen’s “Critical Text Project” demonstrates that what initially seemed like bad grammar turns out to be consistent examples of Early Modern English, which dates from the century prior to the KJV translation. Certainly Early Modern English would not have been the idiom Joseph Smith or any other 19th Century author would have used in writing an original work, nor is it an idiom that is present in anything else Joseph Smith wrote over the course of his lifetime. So, again, this would argue for a “tight” translation and the idea that Joseph functioned as sort of a newsreader more than translator in the traditional sense.
In a tight translation, KJV language becomes far less problematic, as it would suggest that this was the language that the Lord gave Joseph Smith to read aloud to Oliver, and so the Lord, not Joseph, is responsible for the similarities between the two texts. For my part, it makes sense to me that the Lord would provide Joseph language with which he, and most of the Bible-reading world, would be comfortably familiar rather than an entirely different translation of the same material.
And again, it’s important to note that this material wasn’t transcribed by Joseph but by Oliver, and there are plenty of witnesses to the process who insist that Joseph didn’t have any manuscript from which to read. There are also errors like the Red Sea and the Son of Righteousness that show that Oliver was receiving the information from Joseph aurally, not copying out of a book. So the idea of simple plagiarism becomes an increasingly problematic proposition.
Back to more of your Question #2, much of which I responded to in Question #1:
The above example, 2 Nephi 19:1, dated in the Book of Mormon to be around 550 BC, quotes nearly verbatim from the 1611 AD translation of Isaiah 9:1 KJV – including the translators’ italicized words. Additionally, Joseph qualified the sea as the Red Sea. The problem with this is that (a) Christ quoted Isaiah in Matt. 4:14-15 and did not mention the Red Sea, (b) “Red” sea is not found in any source manuscripts, and (c) the Red Sea is 250 miles away.
Yep. It’s a mistake. As its own title page has announced for 175 years, the Book of Mormon contains the “mistakes of men.” As mentioned above, this one looks like it was probably a transcription error on Oliver’s part. It doesn’t seem to have any real doctrinal significance, as far as I can tell. And it is certainly not a mistake that would exist if Joseph were copying the passage out of the Bible like a competent plagiarist.
In the above example, the KJV translators added 7 italicized words not found in the source Hebrew manuscripts to its English translation. Why does the Book of Mormon, completed 1,200 years prior, contain the exact identical seven italicized words of 17th century translators?
Again, the italics are irrelevant, as is the age of the original Book of Mormon text. The issue is similarities between two separate translations, not the source material. And, again, the answer that makes sense to me is that Joseph was engaged in a tight translation and that the Lord determined that the KJV English was the most appropriate English expression of Isaiah’s ideas.
I don’t know what status you give Hugh Nibley – was he an official or unofficial apologist? He was on the BYU payroll, after all. Regardless of what badge he wore, he clarifies this issue better than I could. I will likely be quoting from the good Dr. Nibley repeatedly over the course of this reply, so I thought I’d set his words apart in a different color – I chose red, the color of fire, as Nibley’s words are often the crucible in which nonsense goes to die.
And why should anyone quoting the Bible to American readers of 1830 not follow the only version of the Bible known to them?
Actually the Bible passages quoted in the Book of Mormon often differ from the King James Version, but where the latter is correct there is every reason why it should be followed. When Jesus and the Apostles and, for that matter, the Angel Gabriel quote the scriptures in the New Testament, do they recite from some mysterious Urtext? Do they quote the prophets of old in the ultimate original? Do they give their own inspired translations? No, they do not. They quote the Septuagint, a Greek version of the Old Testament prepared in the third century B.C. Why so? Because that happened to be the received standard version of the Bible accepted by the readers of the Greek New Testament. When “holy men of God” quote the scriptures it is always in the received standard version of the people they are addressing.
We do not claim the King James Version of the Septuagint to be the original scriptures—in fact, nobody on earth today knows where the original scriptures are or what they say. Inspired men have in every age have been content to accept the received version of the people among whom they labored, with the Spirit giving correction where correction was necessary.
Tomorrow: The Joseph Smith Translation!