Richard Packham's review of Book of Mormon Book of Lies

While I disagree with him on many issues, ex-Mormon atheist Richard Packham has a pretty good review of the book, Book of Mormon Book of Lies by Meredith and Kendal Sheets (2012), a volume arguing that Joseph Smith plagiarised from the accounts of Marco Polo's travels. One can find the entire review here. The following are some highlights thereof:

Readers anxious to find any criticism of the LDS church or its sacred founding scripture, however far-fetched, will grab this book. But even the most ardent "anti-Mormons" should ask some fundamental questions about the authors' claims . . . Another obvious omission is the authors' apparent ignorance about a major event in the coming forth of the BoM: the loss of the first 116 pages of the manuscript by Martin Harris. Most scholars, Mormon and non-Mormon, who have examined the textual and historical evidence, say that the present first part of the BoM (replacing the lost pages) was written only after the last part had been completed. This fact alone would raise serious problems with the Sheets theory, which is based on the assumption that the BoM manuscript was started on page one and continued steadily onward.

Another part of the Sheets theory that seems unwarranted is that something appearing on page 266 of the 1830 BoM (that is, 266/588th of the way into the book) could be a copy of something 266/588th of the way into the Travels of Marco Polo. Such an assumption would require that the supposed plagiarists were being so methodical that they knew beforehand that their own manuscript would be 588 pages long, and they were measuring their own writing alongside the Polo book. Sorry, but that is quite unlikely. And plagiarists don't work that way . . .Many examples of parallels between BoM civilizations and Polo's accounts of customs among the Tartars of eastern Asia are given. The authors explain this by citing one pre-1830 writer who theorized that the American Indians are descended from Tartar invaders who were blown off course during an attempt to invade Japan (a historical event) and landed in America. This justified the Smiths in putting features of Tartar civilization into the BoM, as they would be "authentic." The authors do not explain how this alleged idea of the Smiths would fit in with their premise in the BoM that the American Indians are descended from Israelites, not from Tartars.

Several other questions arise that put the basic premises of the authors in doubt. They must assume that the Smiths actually had access to these many travel books over a course of several years. This implies that they owned the books. All our evidence of the Smith family situation during that time is that they were rather poor. They lost their farm for failure to make payments. They fell behind even in their subscription to the local newspaper. How could they afford to accumulate a small library of esoteric books? The authors suggest that they could have traveled to larger cities to bookstores, or that a relative who made trips to London could get them. And then one must ask what eventually became of this library of travel books? They seem to have disappeared, like the golden plates and the 116 pages of manuscript.

The lost 116 pages raises another question. Clearly, from all accounts, Joseph Jr. was devastated when Harris confessed to having lost the manuscript. Why? If Sr. and Jr. had been working on the project since 1811, they had a manuscript already, which was written in their own handwriting. The 116 lost pages were not in the Smiths' handwriting, but had been written by scribes. Why were the Smiths so concerned? If, as the Sheets suggest, the Smiths had written the whole thing, without scribes, why didn't they simply go through the dictation process again, for the lost pages? And then we must also ask, where is the real original manuscript, in the Smiths' handwriting? . . .the majority of the similarities which the authors see as proof of plagiarism are just coincidences, and nothing more. It does not prove plagiarism if the description of a ruler's residence in two different works includes words such as "palace," "magnificent," "gold," "throne," etc. Coincidences are common, and prove nothing.

Actually, is it not quite a coincidence that there are so many similarities between the story of the production of the book under review and the authors' scenario about the production of the BoM?

·       Both books were written by a father and son team;

·       Both were originally the idea of the father;

·       Both took decades to put together;

·       Both were self-published;

·       Both books were claimed by their authors that they would "alter the course of global religion," but did not;

·       Both books claimed to be new and unique, but were not;

·       Both books are the same length (Sheets: 590, BoM: 588);

·       The son took on the major role of promoting both books: Smith Jr. founded a church and sent missionaries out; Kendal Sheets does the promoting for his book, making frequent public appearances to promote it and has hired a public relations firm (DeHart & Company) for that purpose.

Concluding this rather negative review, Packham writes:

In summary, there are too many problems with this book to recommend it, even to the BoM's most fervent critics.

One has to give credit where credit is due to Packham for writing a rather negative review of a book that, at the time, was pretty popular in the world of online anti-Mormonism.

Interestingly, one former LDS who, while portraying himself as an expert on Mormonism (when in fact he lacks even basic intellectual integrity) wrote a rather favourable review of the book, with this hilarious conclusion:

Their work, over 25 years no less, is clearly extensive and painstaking offering such an abundance of evidence one wonders how on earth the Mormon Church is going to have anything to say about this.

In the comments section, he wrote:

I suggest you take off your blinkers, examine the real world evidence, and weigh up Mormon claims against that.

Physician, heal thyself! Perhaps he should take up his own advice before writing pieces like this!

In reality, the methodology of the authors in their book (which I own/have read, fwiw) is "parallelomania." For a good discussion of this issue, I would recommend the works of Benjamin McGuire, such as this paper, "Parallelomania Criticism of the Textual Parallels Theories."

Furthermore, this novel (and whacky) thesis does not explain the evidences for the verisimilitude and historicity of the Book of Mormon, including the use of a pre-exilic source of the David-Goliath narrative; the Arabian Peninsula geography of the Book of Mormon; the onomasticon of the Book of Mormon, and many other elements that belie the thesis that it was fabricated by Joseph Smith.