In
his review of Marian Bodine's tract, Book of Mormon vs. The Bible (or common
sense), D. Charles Pyle addressed the following argument against the Book
of Mormon, “43. IV Nephi 6, 57 words are used to say 59 years had passed away”
thusly:
Reply to Bodine's Forty-third (43rd)
Reason for Rejecting the Book of Mormon.
One
last straw to pull from Ms. Bodine's clutching hand, readers may find the
following quotation of interest:
One
final characteristic, reflecting a tempo of life style perhaps forever gone, is
the Hebrew lack of urgency to get a thing said. Any modern editor would feel
duty-bound to blue-pencil out much of the Old Testament. (Edward W. Goodrick,
Do It Yourself Hebrew And Greek, (1980, Zondervan Publishing/Multnomah Press),
p. 15:6)
Rather
than being a fault that proves that the Book of Mormon cannot be true, this
criticism turns out to be a good evidence of its truthfulness! Too bad for CRI
that someone did not blue-pencil out all of Ms. Bodine's paper.
For further reading on the “wordiness of the Book of Mormon,”
see Jeff Lindsay, Is
the Book of Mormon too wordy to be true?